helwen

The thing about gardening is that there's always something new to learn. Here's something that might be useful to some folks.

Unless you have a giant/professional garden, it's possible to do something to protect your plants from frost threats. Even on some of the professional orchards I've been reading about attempts to minimize damage, but kind of hard to cover hundreds of trees....

Anyway, for the rest of us, all we have to do is cover the potentially endangered plants until the frost has gone by. They don't need a lot of insulation either, as it's the cold plus the moisture that's the problem -- keep the ice from touching the plants and you're good.

Out here we tend to use hay chaff, but when I lived in the city I used fabric and/or sheets. I've saved more than one crop of tomatoes in the fall this way too, when they've been not quite ready to take in.

Stick some sticks in your garden or pots first, or some type of support structure, so the fabric doesn't crush anything, then lay the fabric over the plants. If it's going to be windy, find some rocks or bricks or something to weigh down the corners and sides of the fabric. After the danger's past, remove the sheets.

I have to get some chaff over to the potatoes myself today... and happily I don't have to remove it in their cases, because they'll just grow up through it. The strawberries need covering too though and for those I might use fabric although I won't worry overmuch about setting up an anti-crush structure since they're so low to the ground anyway. But they are flowering and we would like to have strawberries so...

Life is always interesting :)