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I’ll admit up front that I am not the biggest fan of winter. The first rains are nice, cozy, and seasonal. First snows are gorgeous, all wonderland and Christmas-like. But once wet weather marches into January I’m over the winter romance and Jack Frost and I are no longer speaking. Perhaps my great love affair with plants has made me biased.
Here are some strategies that seasoned gardeners use to protect their ornamental plants, trees, shrubs, and vegetables from the wrath of Old Man Winter.
If you live in an area that receives heavy snow, there’s no reason to go looking for trouble if you can avoid it. I would encourage you to plant cold-hardy perennials, trees, and shrubs from the very beginning. Local nurseries as well as your cooperative extension office can help guide you in the right direction. That said, cold-hardy or not, many plants could use a little help from the gardener getting plants safely from fall to the following spring.
For gardens growing in places that see very little (or no) snow, general frost protection can make all the difference. Most cold-weather protection will involve some kind of barrier to prevent frost or snow from settling on plant foliage.
Antitranspirants are usually made of an acrylic, latex, or wax which forms a film over the surface of plant foliage. The idea here is that they reduce moisture loss. It makes sense that they are often used on Christmas trees to keep them fresh for several weeks. It seems that gardeners are split into two camps when it comes to using antitranspirants. One group likes the success they’ve had with them, while the other group argues that they interfere with the normal process of gas exchange and believes that these products do more harm to the plant than good.
This controversy about whether these products are good or bad for plants has left me on the fence, so I decided to abandon the idea of using them and just stick to using various physical barriers as cold buffers. I will leave you, dear reader, to experiment and decide for yourself.
If you think vegetable gardening is only for the summer months, then I have some good news for you. The winter vegetable garden is a thing. Incidentally, although cold-weather crops can be kept through the winter months, they should be started in early fall so that the majority of their growth is finished before freezing temperatures take hold. Much of the “winter garden” is about keeping the grown (or nearly grown) vegetables fresh for winter eating.
Cool-weather vegetable varieties such as kale, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, turnips, and even lettuce all happily produce for you in what are typically considered the “down months” for gardening.
For the mild-winter areas where light frosts are the norm, many winter veggies such as kale and broccoli don’t need protection at all. In fact, a little frostbite just adds flavor to both broccoli and turnips. Surviving a hard frost or snow is a different story, of course.
Growing winter vegetables in portable containers is worth considering as the plants can simply be brought under an existing porch cover or other sheltered area. If they are planted in the ground, there are other ways of protecting them.
Everyone knows you can’t beat Mother Nature at her own game. She runs the show and isn’t shy about throwing her weight around just to prove a point. But there are many ways to stack the odds in your favor and have most of your garden come out unscathed.
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