I’ve had a heck of week or three between being sick before I went to Vegas and getting even sicker while I was there. I’m still not up to par but I’m doing a lot better today than I have in more than a week. I think …

We got home early Monday morning and my husband had been wise enough to have both Monday and Tuesday off work. He tried going out in the garden on Monday afternoon to disassemble the patio furniture and start putting it away but it was cold, gloomy and rained quite a bit that day so he didn’t get very far.

Tuesday was a different story. It was very nice outside and while I was lying on the couch still feeling ill he decided to go outside and finish what he’d started the day before. He also managed to mound some soil around the base of ALL of our many roses in order to give the roots, graft and the first foot or so of above ground growth a bit of winter protection.

Hopefully over the weekend we’ll both get out into the garden.

I’d like to trim some of the roses that have very long branches that I know will die over winter. If I trim them a bit I can more easily protect what’s left with a large pile of leaves and some burlap wrapped around the roses. Then when spring comes all I’ve got to do is take the burlap off and digg out the leaves and if it’s anything like previous years there will be very little winter damage to the rose branches and if I’m really lucky the stems might even still be green.

Most of our roses are fairly hardy, but I have a feeling this is going to be a brutal winter so I want to be sure to protect the plants. We lost a few roses last year because we didn’t do any winter protection. It was a mild winter but we had very little snow so the cold, ice and frost damage might have been even worse than if we had had a good snow cover.

Have you begun to winterize your garden yet? Or do you even think about protecting your plants at all?