Cold Climate Gardening

Not too long ago, a reader emailed me and asked,

I bought some hostas and dwarf bleeding hearts to plant. Shortly thereafter I hurt my knee and I can’t go out there and plant them. They are all planted in one gallon plastic pots. How can I safely winter them? If I put them in my garage they will still freeze.

You may have plants in containers that should have been planted, but weren't. How do you winter them over?

It is the roots you are worried about freezing. The rule of …

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There are snowdrops under this snow
Some of you, I am sure, thought I was being overly pessimistic when I said the snowdrops sprouting in January wouldn’t be blooming in a month. As you can see above, my assessment of how things would go was pretty accurate. As a matter of fact, at this point I am not sure I will ever see them.

Yes, I am suffering from WWNE, a delusional malady to which Northerners are particularly vulnerable. WWNE stands for …

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For those of you who think my snowdrops will shortly be rocketing from the earth and bursting into bloom: fear not. The snow came back. More predicted tomorrow.

Happy New Year.

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One of the nice things about short winter days is that it’s not too difficult to get up before sunrise. These two photos were taken a bit after seven thirty in the morning. It’s not going to be much of a white Christmas, I’m afraid. Sunday the snow pack was dissolved by rain and highs in the 50s(F), and the highs are supposed to be above freezing the rest of the week.

In the second photo below, the edge of the cloud cover appears as a straight line, revealing the golden light coming up over the horizon.

The Heavens are

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I wrote this essay several years ago after the winter of 1993-1994 and I dig it out to reread every winter in which I feel I’m suffering excessively. Of course, no matter how bad your winter is, someone else can top you, so I don’t promote this as the worst cabin fever anyone ever had, just the worst I ever had. Still, I bet I’ve got at least 80% of you beat.
Rundy and Talitha standing in our driveway March 1994. The arrows point to the top of the piles of shoveled snow, which rise above Rundy’s five-foot height. You can also see the edge of the porch roof on the left. (Click image for larger view.)
I suppose I should have been suspicious when we got a foot of snow on Halloween. But we live in a zone 4 climate, and flurries, even the occasional inch or two, are not uncommon for the end of October. Besides, it was really wet snow. Another couple degrees warmer and it would have been all rain. In a day or two it had melted–a fluke. But soon it snowed again. And again. The children thought it was wonderful. They sledded and built snowmen to their hearts’ content. But it got colder and colder. Unlike other years, the temperature didn’t rise above freezing, even during the day. The driveway never showed itself; the piles of shoveled snow on either side rose higher and higher. Eventually, the snow was just too high to be any fun. When it’s hip high on an adult, you can imagine where it comes up to on a third grader.

By December it was routinely below zero (F) at night. (That’s -18C.) In our old, under-insulated house, when it gets that cold, the windows frost over completely. In the whole house, there was only one window you could see out of, and it belonged to the kitchen door. But what was there to look at? Snow, and more snow. The sub-zero cold did have one advantage. There’s a certain macho pleasure in calling the office, “I’m going to be in late this morning. It got down to 37 below last night (that’s -38C) and I can’t get the car started yet.” But that gets old fast.

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I don’t have any bare ground for crocus to be poking up through–we have at least 18 inches of snow on the ground. Is it because the crocus are near the heated greenhouse that they are coming up? I hope some time this winter you and Judy both can tell us what size and type greenhouse you each have, what criteria you used in choosing your greenhouse, and what, if anything, you would do differently if you were going to purchase one again.

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Ah, November. A little time to breathe and do something besides the hard physical work of gardening. Like, read seed catalogs and go slightly mad with imagining all the things I’ll grow next year. And read gardening magazines–actually read them, not just flip through them and hope to remember them when there’s more time. My best favorite garden magazine is BBC Gardener’s World. The big glossy British magazine is obviously not cold-climate, but it is all in color, loads of photos, actually 12x a year, and many more pages than any of the US things. It is informative and good for the creative juices to see what people not in my neighborhood are …

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