Cold Climate Gardening

Decoy weather–an apt term. Somehow, once October is over, it’s hard to call it Indian Summer anymore. I have noticed around here that we consistently have one day in the first week of November that is warm and sunny. I always give the kids the day off from school then and have a general clean up the yard day. Anything we don’t want to get buried under snow has to get put away, and anything we want to find once it snows, like snow shovels and sleds, gets put in a more convenient location. We usually don’t get decoy weather again until January, which around these parts is known as the January Thaw. The snow all melts but the …

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18 degrees at 6am; back to cold weather again after a couple of weeks of decoy weather–days into the 50’s & even 60!
The frost was so beautiful at sunrise this morning (9:10 am because of Black Mountain & Katka peak) that I was mesmerised. It was land of glitter & glory: prismatic rainbows and silver everywhere, diamond beads on the birdfeeders….ooh-er, lucky to be alive.

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You were smart to bring them in. You don’t want the roots to freeze. Once they are in the ground, I would try to protect the tops for about a week to let them settle in. (The traditional vegetable garden protection is bed sheets from the house. You could also use the pot they just came out of to cover them at night. Of course, all the covering has to come off for the day. And if you get far enough below freezing, nothing helps.) After that the roots should still keep growing until the ground freezes hard. The nursery bed is probably a good idea. But don’t just depend on the tags to stay in the ground …

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Had our first frost last night, which for around here, was later than usual. I don’t know exactly how cold it got last night, but I wish I did. I’ve been looking at digital max-min thermometers, especially the wireless ones, for a while now, but the price keeps me from indulging. It always comes back to: “Do you know how many plants I could buy for that much money?” And I’ve discovered that a lot of the wireless ones don’t record temperatures as low as -35°F, which is the lowest I think it’s ever gotten since we’ve moved here. One company that prides itself on making wireless thermometers that do go that low is Koch. Theirs go down to …

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I weeded half the asparagus bed yesterday. It hadn’t been weeded at all this season because of my hospital stay and then Deirdre being born, and since it hadn’t been weeded it was never mulched. The asparagus seem to be doing okay despite the neglect, although some are leaning way over, which makes me think their roots weren’t buried deeply enough. I bought my plants from Johnny’s Selected Seeds, so you’d think they’d be hardy, but these first two years that they’ve been in the ground, the first sprouts have been knocked down by hard frost–maybe I should say a hard freeze. Of course, we have been having exceptionally cold frosts exceptionally late in the season. Almost all the …

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