Cold Climate Gardening

Radicchios, I just discovered a few years ago, are Winter Hardy Vegetables! (That is a big enough deal here in Z4 to rate caps.) I do nothing to winter them over–this panic covering was because they had only been snoozing over the false winter under their blanket of snow and were now putting out new […]

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We are having rain today, tomorrow is freezing rain/sleet followed by 1 to 3 inches of snow, and leading up to sub-zero lows by midweek. I have been checking out warm climate garden blogs such as Garden Spot and Talking Dirty. They both have photos of what’s currently growing/in bloom in their respective gardens and […]

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Now the NOAA predicts near-zero weather for us in the next few days. I will have to race about covering the radicchios I was admiring yesterday as nearly large enough to start cutting, and the tender nubbins of other things fooled by the early warmth. It has been daily into the 40’s: decoy weather.
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It started last night, and the weather service is predicting 12 to 20 inches of accumulation. My cousin in Maryland got 26 inches. This has been the kind of winter to severely aggravate cabin fever. Snow so deep the kids can’t play outside, and temps so cold they would be back inside so soon it […]

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It’s not that the temperature is that much different–it is that we have sudden huge thaws that uncover what is beneath the snow. The little Colchicum flowered under the snow as the ground hadn’t frozen when the snow came and it was good & warm under there–and there is quite a bit of light […]

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Judy, I have a hard time imagining how your climate is different than mine. My colchicums all bloomed and went by long before the first snow fell here. And either you’ve had quite a bit more thaw than we have, or you’ve got X-ray vision! I certainly wouldn’t be able to see anything blooming underneath […]

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When I read This Green World for the first time I kept running outside to check things, and inside to call my Mother to exclaim over what I had just read. That sense of wonder is exactly what I love about this book–and the amazing facts. Then I lent the book […]

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