freeze

My yard will look funny tomorrow morning. I was suddenly reminded it is predicted to freeze. I don't want to loose any of my young plants, or my short-term lettuce, or my new perennials that probably aren't quite settled into the ground yet. So I covered the garden plots with sheets. I blanketed my lilac, daylilies, geranium, dianthus, rhubarb and peony with a thick layer of leaf mulch. In addition I laid a large pillowcase flat over the rhubarb, and popped another over the peony. I covered the outdoor echeveria, geranium and dianthus around the mailbox, and all the new bedding plants in the back yard with large upended pots, buckets and a few cardboard boxes. All to protect foliage from freeze. In the morning I will gather up all the covers and see who survived.

I had to cut the flower stalks off the brunnera to get it to fit under a pot, so now have a pretty little bouquet in the house.

In terms of seedlings and young plants, I brought indoors everything from the coldframe house, except for some recently-potted up mock strawberries out of the yard (there's plenty more where those came from) and the experimentally potted up weeds (featured in an upcoming post). The jugs of plants I really don't want to loose- borage, echinacea, cosmos- I brought indoors. Others that are less important because I already have plenty growing or they might be tougher (marigold, broccoli), I moved off the deck and into the coldframe. Curious to see if the double protection of jug plastic and coldframe plastic walls will keep them from succumbing to the freeze.