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Sally Nex

Tag Archives: frost

Life in the greenhouse: January

20 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by sallynex in greenhouse

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

citrus, frost, frost protection, greenhouse, lemon verbena, lemons, tender plants, winter

img_4251

Half-finished insulation to the left, not-quite cleared cucamelons to the right: I have, it is fair to say, totally failed to sort out the greenhouse this winter.

Blimey it’s chilly. Inside and out: life got a bit hectic last autumn and I didn’t get around to my usual bubblewrap-insulation-and-greenhouse-heater routine. So my greenhouse – usually a cosy refuge at this time of year – is distinctly less than welcoming at the moment.

However: the decision not to heat the greenhouse this winter, if a little unintentional, has been enlightening. Normally I would have the heater on 24/7 when the weather is like this: I don’t heat my greenhouse to tropical temperatures but I do like to keep it somewhere around the 5°C mark. When it’s -5°C outside, as it was last night, that would mean having to lift the temperature by a whole 10°C above ambient – loading my electricity bill to groaning point and playing who knows what havoc with the environment.

I’ve always felt mildly guilty about heating the greenhouse. As well as being positively profligate with resources I normally shepherd carefully – that is, electricity and warmth – it is very expensive and makes something of a mockery of my pretensions to thriftiness. After all, when your overwintered chillies cost you at least £50 to keep alive in a frosty winter you could probably buy gold-plated ones for less.

img_4253

But – avert your eyes from the weeds, please – I can’t be going far wrong when I’ve got lemons like these

Failing to heat my greenhouse, though, has been an eye-opener. Just look at my lemons! (No smutty jokes at the back, please). The scented-leaf geraniums have fared well too, and the lemon verbena.

Most of the tender herbs and edibles which I move into the greenhouse over winter to protect them from frost can survive down to a few degrees below. Lemons, for example, can tolerate -5°C; geraniums (pelargoniums), lemon verbena and French tarragon to about -1°C. The secret is to keep them dry. Soggy compost freezes at anything below zero, wrecking delicate root systems, while dry compost, though cold, will not freeze so does no damage.

So I haven’t watered my lemon tree, or the geraniums, since I brought them indoors in early November. They’re fine. So is the grapefruit, and the lemon verbena, and even the Nerine sarniensis which is the only thing in here which isn’t edible but I can’t bear to evict it as it’s so lovely when it flowers. The overwintering chilli (an Aji type, one of the more hardy) has succumbed, so I’d guess that very heat-loving Mexican types with fleshy, tender stems freeze at zero.

img_4252

I brought my three-pot salad system in here this autumn too: the extra shelter has kept them growing and I’ve had salads to pick since October.

But for most, just bringing them into a greenhouse without heating it has been enough. The glass alone raises temperatures by about 5°C, after all (and much more on a sunny day, though that heat is lost by nightfall). So if you take last night, the coldest here for several years at about -5°C, inside the greenhouse it will still have been only just at freezing. Not enough to do any damage. Line the greenhouse with bubblewrap or – I’m told but haven’t tried myself – cardboard, or wrap plants individually in horticultural fleece, hessian with straw tucked underneath, or more bubblewrap – and you can raise that by a few degrees further, potentially keeping even quite tender plants frost-free without the need for heating.

Other little tricks to try include keeping a pond in the greenhouse to act as a heat sink, absorbing the sun’s heat by day and releasing it by night; and of course hotbeds, which is too big a subject to tackle here but the most natural greenhouse heater you’ll ever have.

But I think my days of artificially heating a greenhouse are over. I’m sure the environment will thank me one day. My bank account certainly will.

Image

Wordless Wednesday

30 Wednesday Nov 2016

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frost, ice

wp_20161130_08_13_18_pro

Posted by sallynex | Filed under wordless wednesday

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All tucked up

23 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in chicken garden, cutting garden

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Tags

cut flowers, dahlias, frost, frost protection, overwintering, winter

dahlias_overwinter1

Tuck dahlias up for their winter hibernation as soon as the stems are blackened by frost

I arrived at the Chicken Garden this morning to find the big, handsome dahlias hanging their heads, their lush leaves turned slatey black and drooping disconsolately.

Abbie – garden owner – grows dahlias by the armful to cut for guests at the B&B, and very gorgeous they’ve been for the last few months. So there are two whole rows of them in the cutting garden as well as a dozen or so in various spots around the main flower beds.

dahlias_overwinter2

If you’re leaving them in the ground, cut stems right back (if lifting, leave 15cm of stalk intact)

You can leave dahlias as they are till the blackened-leaf stage (and they’ll keep flowering, too, if you dead-head) but once the first frost has struck it’s time to leap into action.

dahlias_overwinter3

Mulch thickly – at least 15cm deep. Autumn leaves are ideal for this as they don’t hold on to moisture as much as compost.

I always prefer to leave a plant in the ground if at all possible, and in the balmy south-west we’re in just the sort of place where you can get away with it with dahlias most years. But you never know quite what the weather has in store: if it’s a really wet one, or possibly even a really snowy one, you could still end up losing the lot.

I decided to cut my losses: so I’ve left the bigger (and therefore, I reason, more hardy) border varieties in the ground and lifted any smaller plants and also those in pots and containers where the roots are more exposed.

dahlias_overwinter4

And finally: cover the whole thing with a layer of hessian (as here), insect-proof mesh, weed-suppressing fabric, old t-shirts… in fact anything that’s breathable. Two purposes: 1) it holds the leaves in place and stops them blowing off, and 2) it gives one extra layer of frost protection to the tubers. Pin down securely with bits of sturdy wire. And that’s it till spring (I hope…)

In the cutting garden, I have covered one whole row and lifted the other. They’re currently trimmed back to about 15cm and turned upside down to dry and drain, the shortened stalks poked through the slats of the greenhouse staging to hold them in place.

Next week, once they’re fully dry, I’ll pack them into boxes of damp-ish sand or spent compost and move them to the shed (drier than the greenhouse). After that I shall be going round with fingers permanently crossed till the spring warms up next year and I can pull back the covers to see if my luck has held. Here’s hoping…

Karma camellia

25 Saturday Apr 2015

Posted by sallynex in chicken garden

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

camellia, frost, frost damage

Hmm.

I’m never quite sure about camellias. On the one hand, when they look like this, they’re fabulous.

camellia1

But they all too often look like this.

camellia2

This is classic frost damage: something to which camellias, or some varieties at least, are particularly prone. You don’t need much: this one is in what I call the chicken garden I look after just down the road from me in south Somerset, where we have only very mild frosts – in fact I didn’t even notice the one that caused this damage.

It ruins the display completely: not just browning the petals but throwing them to the floor like a lot of used tissue papers. The odd thing is that another pink variety next door, with larger flowers, came through all but unscathed. So it’s clearly something to which some types are more prone than others.

camellia3

This one came with the garden so nobody quite knows what kind it is. Shame, or I would have been able to warn everyone off it. It’s small-flowered and a rather saccharine shade of pink: not my favourite.

As you’ve no doubt gathered by now, this is a plant I find hard to love. But nonetheless I have been assiduously dead-heading the worst offenders and take off a bucketful of browning pink petals every time I visit, in a (largely vain) attempt to keep it looking moderately acceptable for a day or two at least. I shall be roundly glad when it’s finally finished.

I am very gently trying to persuade the owner that its display is so liable to tarnish and never quite look what it should that it should become an ex-camellia in fairly short order. She’s quite in favour of a quick and humane end to the misery but I’m not so sure her mother is. Oh dear: I fear we’re stuck with damp brown used tissues for some time to come.

Random acts of frosting

22 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

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Tags

French lavender, frost, lavandula stoechas, lavender

lavender_dead

French lavender (Lavandula stoechas) may be terribly pretty with its bunny rabbit ears and soft grey foliage. But it is, notoriously, not very hardy.

For once we’ve been having proper, regular frosts here in the West Country and it’s done for this French lavender in one if the gardens I look after.

lavender_alive

But not this one. It’s in the same bed, just a few feet away, with no obvious extra shelter to keep the frost off.

Frost pockets can be as random and unpredictable, even within a single garden, as soil types. But at least I know what not to plant in this spot in future!

Ne’er cast a clout….

26 Tuesday Apr 2011

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

frost, hawthorn, proverbs

…till May is out. So the saying goes.

It’s one of the oldest ones in the book – but there is a certain amount of debate as to what exactly it means.

The clouting bit is clear enough: it’s all to do with warm clothing. A ‘clout’ is an olde-Englishe word for ‘cloth’ – so ‘casting’ (throwing) a ‘clout’ (cloth, or coat) means taking off your coat.

So you might interpret it as warning you against thinking that just because there’s a spate of warm weather going on early in the year, you can go ahead and act like it’s summer: chances are we’ve got more cold weather on the way and that coat will be going back on.

In gardening terms, this means you can’t be absolutely sure there won’t yet be a late frost – even if it is 25°C, hasn’t rained in weeks and everyone’s heading like lemmings to the seaside.

But what about the ‘May is out’ bit? Some say it means you shouldn’t lower your guard (or your horticultural fleece) until the beginning of June. But, it has also been pointed out, it could refer to the old word for hawthorn – still known as ‘may’ by my mum, who used to eat the leaves when she were a nipper. She called it ‘bread and cheese’, but don’t try it – it’s horrible.

Well guess what.

This is the may in my hedgerow: it opened its pure white flowers over the Easter weekend and is now ‘out’ in the outest way it is possible to be.

So to continue my selfless pursuit of research and truth in the services of English etymology: this is by way of marking your card. If there is no further frost from this point forward, I think we can safely say that ‘may’ in the saying refers to the hawthorn.

If however I have been entirely duped and bamboozled and my new potatoes – now already at the earthing-up stage and about as vulnerable to frost as it’s possible to be – are clobbered to black slime by a perfectly normal May frost, I think we can probably conclude that the May in question is the month.

Actually, for completeness, I could do with some fellow researchers a bit further north: is there anyone not quite as close to the south coast as I am with may in blossom at the moment? Let me know and we’ll see if you get caught short by a late frost too. Citizen science – it ain’t just the Natural History Museum at it, you know.

Oh, and I hope you all had a very happy Easter, by the way!

By the way….

24 Sunday Oct 2010

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

frost, ginger, hedychium

…it did flower for me after all 😀


The unseasonably sunny weather over the last few weeks played in my favour so I had this to look at and swoon over out of my garden room window.


Actually it doesn’t stop there: there are two more flower spikes, both at the stage this one was at a couple of weeks ago and looking a little dicey as to whether they’ll actually make it to full glory.

However it must be said we have now had our first ground frost (to one degree above, so it doesn’t really count, but it was a warning shot across the bows). So my triffids are safely stashed in my insulated and soon-to-be-heated greenhouse, which I hope will soon be filled with the scent of gingerlily flowers.

Collateral damage

20 Tuesday Jan 2009

Posted by sallynex in climate change

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

astelia, cordyline, frost, frost damage, jungle planting, Melianthus major

Oh dear.

A quick tour of my so-called jungle garden (i.e. the place I so optimistically planted up with climate change anticipation plants last summer) reveals I didn’t exactly get out of the recent cold snap scot free.

This is (or was) a purple cordyline. I was rather fond of it as it made a snazzy contrast with the libertias and hostas, to say nothing of a canna behind it, and gave me the pleasant illusion that I was quite good at putting plants together. I thought they were meant to be bone hardy, too.

The remains of a Melianthus major that was just getting into its stride last autumn…


…and my poor Astelia chathamica ‘Silver Spear’, lately of Chelsea 2008, which also looks to be less hardy than you would think.
Some of these might – just – come back, though I’m not sure they’ll ever be quite the same again. Now, here’s a quandary. do I press on and insist on a jungly area at the bottom of my garden anyway? (I’ll have my banana-mad eight-year-old daughter to answer to if I don’t). Do I resort to drought-tolerant Mediterranean plants only to have them washed away and drowned in a sea of mud every winter? Or do I plant a sea of English flowers and water them every five minutes all summer, also risking the customary deluge turning to a desert-like scorcher and the whole lot frazzling to a crisp as soon as I turn my back?
You know, this gardening lark isn’t as straightforward as it looks.

The great thaw begins

12 Monday Jan 2009

Posted by sallynex in pond

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

frost, ice, Stratiodes

Walking down the garden drops of melted hoarfrost are falling from the trees, and for the first time in three weeks, there is water on my pond.


It’s still three-quarters frozen, and all pond-life is suspended just beneath the surface like a snapshot of the moment before the cold snap began: this water soldier (Stratiodes aloides) is meant to have sunk to the bottom for its winter sleep but it obviously didn’t get away in time.


My pond is a little shallow so I’m hoping all the newts are still OK in there.

I may be getting optimistic here but who knows – I may even get gardening again soon!

Indoor gardening

01 Thursday Jan 2009

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

frost, global warming, New Year, parsnips, resolutions

Frost has stopped play. The pond hasn’t defrosted for a week, and part of the lawn is permanently white. As for the allotment… we had to go and buy some parsnips the other day as the ones I’ve grown so lovingly are now concreted in to a rock-hard veg bed (yeah, I know, should have lifted them and heeled them in somewhere sandier, didn’t get around to it).

The BBC’s rather awe-inspiring monthly weather forecast says this will carry on for the rest of January, as it’s caused by a wodge of high pressure that’s apparently “notoriously difficult to budge”. Oh help. I’ll be reduced to making curtains soon.

Anyway, I’m trying to comfort myself with the thought of millions of tiny slugs freezing solid, and meanwhile doing some indoor gardening. This is long overdue: I’m very late in planning my seed order, which I must send off this week as otherwise the spuds won’t be chitting in time. I’ve also, at last, come up with a coherent design for the front garden, and I’ll be measuring up those bits of the back garden I’m not already digging up shortly – all part of the Great Garden Makeover of course. The only trouble with plans is, you then have to put them into some sort of action… which in my case almost always means half-finished projects all over the garden as the summer rush takes over yet again.

I’ve also been making some New Year’s Resolutions to ring in 2009. A bit of a pointless exercise, of course, but I like to see how quickly I jettison them each year. This year, they are more informed at least thanks to all this blogging (mine but more frequently other people’s).

  • I’m going to start a diary (I do this every year. Never got past March yet. At least I know what I was doing in early spring back to about 1975).
  • While I’m taking those photos for Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day each month, I’m also going to photograph the whole of my garden, warts and all, as a record of all these improvements I’m making (this of course will be strictly not for publication: all photography found on this blog is a triumph of the macro lens over reality).
  • I’m going to start some of those projects I’m planning (see above)
  • I’m going to finish some of those projects I’m planning (see above)
  • I shall try not to get impatient when my eight-year-old wants to plant tulips in my potato beds, but shall let her with a beneficent smile in the interests of keeping her gardening (and will secretly replant the tulips back in the same spot after harvesting the potatoes).
  • My reading of other people’s blogs shall not take over my working life
  • … and nor will surreptitious trips to the allotment when I should be at my desk
  • I shall cram in as much knowledge as I can about gardening, plants and plantspeople, and hopefully end the year a better gardener.

Right, that’ll do for now. I wish everyone who drops by this blog from time to time all the very best for 2009. Happy New Year!

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