As the Garden Grows

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It’s really cooling off at night!

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Is it getting cooler in your area? It’s getting cooler here and the temperatures seem to be dropping lower than they should at night for this time of year.

On Sunday I happened to look at my weather widget on my computer and I saw that it was supposed to go down to 0 Celsius overnight. Yikes! Zero at this time of year? I’ve still got tomatoes, Cannas, Passion flower vines and other tropicals outdoors!

My husband and I talked about how low the temperatures were going to go and I thought about just covering the plants with a sheet of burlap. We have plenty of that for winterizing so it’s handy! Instead we decided to bring some of the more delicate plants – passion flower, jasmine, ornamental pepper and two potted tomato plants into the back porch. Yes it still gets cool in that room but it’s enclosed and it always seem to stay a few degree’s warmer than whatever it is outdoors.

The enclosed back porch faces south and it’s been an ideal room to use when I’ve got my act together and have started seedlings in the late winter or early spring. Some winter days with the sun shinning fully into the room it can get up to between 70 and 80 F in there even when it’s close to zero outside! Of course at night without the sun it cools substantially.

Anyway, I think I might leave the potted tomatoes in the room for as long as I can. Perhaps I’ll be eating fresh tomatoes long after you’ve pulled yours out of the ground?






A colorful Marigold

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This weeks Theme is Colorful

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I haven’t planted any marigolds yet, but I have purchased some. They’re sitting in their little seedling containers just waiting for me to plant them. This marigold is my neighbors.

On mother’s day her family actually did some work in the yard and they planted some flowers for her. A few days later I was out taking photos of my flowers and she insisted that I take pictures of her flowers too. Funny thing is that once I started she wanted me to stop because she decided she didn’t want me to waste my film. Try explaining to a lady that’s almost 90 what a digital camera is!

I truly must be on some kind of orange kick. I have flowers of many colors but I keep wanting to post flowers with orange in them. Even this new theme that I picked out and modified for As the Garden Grows has a lot of orange in it.

Orange is not my favorite color, but for some reason I seem to be very attracted to it in the last while. Odd. I haven’t purchased all my annuals for the garden beds yet … I wonder how many of them will have shades of orange this year?

Glorious Annuals

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Annuals are usually grown to provide color. Since they are only temporary plants in many gardens – if they are always treated as such, they tend to thrive anywhere. Annuals permit gardeners in cold areas to briefly ignore the prospect of inter bleakness and inject a touch of tropical summer color into their gardens.

Annuals are subject to all the normal climatic considerations – wind, salt spray, and summer heat – but they are remarkably resilient plants that carry on flowering under most conditions, except severe cold.

Tender annuals must be planted in spring, after the last frosts, with a view to summer and autumn flowering. However, the so called hardy annuals are often planted in the autumn and left to over-winter for spring flowering. Pansies, Sweet William and Iceland poppies are among the best known hardy annuals. It’s true that the majority of my Pansies (provided they survive the heat of summer), Sweet William (pinks, dianthus) and Iceland poppies often do survive our Canadian zone 6B/ USD zone 5B winters.

With careful planning- depending upon your zone of course, it’s possible to have blooms almost all year round. I tend to have blooms outdoors in my garden from perennials, annuals, bulbs and rhizomes from Mid-March well into November; and indoors my plants such as Thanks Giving and Christmas Cactus, Jasmine and amaryllis give me blooms inside through November to March.

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