[I wrote the majority of this on the 6th, but forgot to post it. My apologies!]
Winter comes to the garden
We’re supposed to get our first real snowfall overnight and tomorrow. This morning at dawn it was 21 F in the garden, the coldest morning yet, with frost covering the highest percentage of surfaces yet – not just the leaves fallen, crumpled and dead, into the garden, but also the roof next door, and cars at the curb, and much more. I’m impressed with how much is still trying to grow. Just in the front garden, which is frequently buffeted by strong winds and is right by a wide street:
- Many of the autumn-blooming crocuses (some of which are still blooming [!], and others of which have already put out their leaves
- Cover crops!! (More below.)
- The yellow single hardy mum
- The hardy lavenders
- The silver thyme (very marginal here)
- The lisianthuses (annual here)
- The perennial scabiosa ‘Butterfly Blue’
- The horehounds
- The two euphorbias, both the succulent and non-succulent one
- The bellflower
- More I’m sure I’m forgetting
Today I did more preparation for winter in the garden, pulling up the large number of stakes, scattering the fallen leaves more evenly around the cover crop area*, moving the potted (and now almost or completely dead, depending on the mum) mums away from the front stairs, and disconnecting and moving the hose. The hose had little bits of ice at the spigot that fell to the asphalt (welcome to the city) like little clear jewels as I struggled to disconnect it, and after I disconnected it, it dripped a little and stopped. As to the stakes, it was interesting to me that some of the vines collapsed when I pulled them up and others stayed at least somewhat up in the air, self-supporting thick tangles of vine. I imagine a stiff wind or a heavy snow will knock them to the ground soon enough, though.
*I was so pleased recently to discover a vivid green plant growing in the crop area and, upon bending down to peer at it, realizing it was a sprouted and decently grown cover crop! Upon moving the fallen leaves around, I discovered numerous other sprouts at various stages of growth. It had been a comparably warm couple of days, so I guess the soil warmed up enough for them to sprout and start to grow. I’m quite relieved that my late cover crop sowing was not in vain after all.
Indoor plant update
The indoor plants are doing quite variably. I’ve been happy to discover that the gotu kola seems surprisingly easy to take care of, despite the fact that I have yet to find a single piece of information on overwintering it inside in cold-winter climates. It’s the easiest plant to water because it tells me when it needs it as surely as if it could talk. If it needs water, it collapses as surely as a punctured balloon, and when it’s had enough water, it springs right back up as if the balloon had been reinflated. Usually I give it enough water, but once so far I haven’t (even though it was as much as I usually give it, I guess it was drier than usual), and upon seeing it still deflated, I gave it a second dosing and, happy, it sprang back to perky life.
Meanwhile, the pineapple sage has a new issue – it’s become infested with aphids. I didn’t even know it could become infested with them, as they were never an issue outside. I am suspicious that they came in with the tweedia, which is a milkwood family member, as milkweeds are famous for their propensity for aphid infestations (and the tweedia is infested too). I don’t really know what to do besides hope that the tiny spider who runs around the main plant table and the wall beside it kills them, because I don’t like to kill anything, not even aphids, and it’s my biggest issue with overwintering plants: In summertime, even if there’s an infested houseplant my solution is simply to take it outside till nature sorts out the problem, and so in wintertime, without nature’s help I am stymied.
The lemongrass is doing excellently, even sending up new stalks, but the rosemaries are doing horribly, making me wonder once again why I ever bother trying to overwinter them. I can’t remember ever successfully overwintering one indoors. One very mild winter one survived outside, but that’s been my only success with rosemary. I don’t know if it’s because I always live in homes with forced air (winters in climates like mine tend to be bad to rosemaries) or if I just don’t have the knack for overwintering them.
The many (many, many) scented and zonal geraniums are up and down at whims, as so often seems to be the way with me and geraniums: They put out new leaves in patterns that are, to me, mysterious, and drop their old ones, or an entire stalk, and then put out new leaves yet again. The fuschias and tender sweet violet (sharing a pot) seem to be doing well as long as I remember to check the pot regularly for dry soil, and the lantanans and sweet Aztec herb (the latter of which I also haven’t found a peep about overwintering indoors), which also share a pot, have recovered from near death just after I took them inside and are robustly healthy now, sending out new shoots in addition to beautiful shiny new leaves, and the lantana closest to the window, ‘Samantha’ (the variegated-leaf, yellow-flowered one), is even about to bloom!
The datura ‘Charles Grimaldi’ dropped its old leaves but has put out new ones (daturas are prone to aphid infestation, so though I haven’t actually spied an aphid on it, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve moved onto it too), and the snail vine is doing much better indoors than it ever did outside this summer, twining for the sunny window on vigorous new growth. The cuban oregano (a common houseplant in cold climates, though I planted it in the ground this summer) has, like the datura, dropped its old leaves, but has also put out new growth. The bay leaf tree, which has been at pretty much the same growth above-ground since I planted it in a large pot late last spring (I think the back yard just isn’t sunny enough for it), seems to be doing about the same indoors so far as it did outside. (I specified ‘above-ground’ because bay leaf trees tend to do their early growth underground, which is why it takes a couple of years for a bay leaf tree even to be salable in nursery markets, often offered in gallon pots with just a few inches of above-ground growth because they have so much root growth per inch of above-ground growth – and I haven’t poked around its roots since I planted it, so I don’t know if its roots have continued to expand even as it hasn’t grown much above-ground. Unfortunately for nursery owners, this tends to make bay leaf trees poor sellers to people who don’t know much about them. I noted that they were one of the main things left in the greenhouse at the nursery at the end of the season, just sitting there waiting for somebody who knows about them to realize how well they were doing. They were even putting out beautiful new above-ground growth in the warm, humid, sunny greenhouse, but the tops still looked tiny.)
The yearly inundation has begun
Every single year, right around 1st December – just like clockwork – the yearly inundation of seed, plant, and spring-planted bulb catalogs begins. Especially seed catalogs. I have gotten several catalogs already, even though there are still things growing in the garden! Still, I know that soon the garden will likely lie dormant, with just the hardiest semi-evergreen and evergreen things still growing – like the lavender, standing tall – and it will be lovely to sit with a mug of herbal tea, alternately staring out at a snowscape and looking through catalogs, daydreaming. So for now, I’m collecting them in their own little pile, biding my time till the dreaming takes over.
Indoor plant update as I’m finally posting this on 17th Dec.
The aphids have gotten worse on the pineapple sage, though they seem to be primarily attacking one stalk, which seems to be the weakest stalk (yet more credence for the idea that pests tend to gravitate towards plants that are already weakened/damaged/whatever in some way). There are still some aphids on the tweedia as well. I got out the paperwhites and amaryllises that I’d oversummered around the time I wrote most of this post, and have been watering them about once a week. The (seven) paperwhites are resprouting, one at a time, but the three amaryllises have yet to do so. I also potted up ‘Vera,’ one of the two amaryllises I got this autumn, and she’s got one bud so far, and got an early Christmas present of the amaryllis ‘Ferrari’ – though there was no color specified with the tag, I correctly assumed it was vivid red – which also already has a bud. I also got a little bulb garden as an early Christmas present, and that has some leaves so far but no buds. I have one more amaryllis and some more paperwhites (a different kind, that the label calls ‘Chinese sacred lily’), but I’ve yet to pot those up.
Snow and ice (written at time of posting)
After flurrying some earlier in the winter, it finally snowed a little around the time I wrote most of this post, and then – after tremendous heavy rains that lasted three days last week – it snowed, iced, sleeted, and rained yesterday. The garden now has a light covering of snow, though it’s melting somewhat on this above-freezing day. My last patch of fall-blooming crocuses is still going, five buds poking out through the snow (that are open when it’s sunny in the garden, it’s just that the front garden gets very little sun in winter compared to summer). Amazingly, some other things are still growing through the snow as well.
A Bee in the City 
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