Cut Backs

The hard freezes the last couple of nights have taken a toll on my outdoor garden; plants that have withstood temperatures as low as the upper 20’s have frozen in this front’s icy grip of 18 degrees. So it’s time to cut away the things that can’t come back*.

How can you tell which leaves will revive as the weather warms? If it’s limp but still green there’s a strong possibility that it will spring back and grow again but limp and brown, black or gray has virtually no chance. However, if the dead parts are cut off some plants will put up new sprouts from the roots—this is where continuous watering benefits; the root ball is often protected from the cold by the soil and water keeps it from drying out i.e. freezing (freezing is essentially dehydration).

In case you’re thinking, “Oh the poor things!” realize that the sweet potato vines are usually gone with the first freeze; the various plants that froze have lived far beyond their normal range. Besides, I did take some cuttings that are still doing well. The Sweet Williams always hold up as they are biennials. Victoria Blue salvia also comes back (sometimes) for a second round but usually only after dying back but this time the leaves have bounced back. The plants that really amaze me though are the petunias! The ordinary white ones are still blooming and growing; I’ve never seen petunias survive this kind of weather! The orange Million Bells look straggly but they’re still blooming as well. Maybe I won’t give up on petunias after all (most of the ones I grew this year had some sort of plague and didn’t do well).

*Wearing garden gloves is a good idea when cutting frozen branches since they can be gooey.

An Automatic Choice

I always look for Victoria Blue Salvia for my garden. Some years I don’t have to buy it since it is a biennial and returns the next season. Its small spiked purple flowers consistently bloom once it gets started. Though it’s called “blue”, there are very few truly blue flowers in nature.

This year, I planted the Victoria Blue’s in several pots—I got stuck once again with buying a whole pack (of 6) that I didn’t need. (The two big home improvement stores sold only 9-packs and large single pots. I don’t want or need that many. I’d rather buy one or two smaller plants that will grow into their places. With the return to downtown/center city living and the increase in multi-family communities, small gardens are the “in thing”—garden centers take note.) Location mattered. The ones in my long Italian terra cotta pots languish while the ones in the larger, deeper pot are flourishing to the point of overcoming their neighbors.


While the salvias’ arching lean is artistic, they were mashing and shading the heliotrope next to them. This heliotrope (the first one I bought) had enough trouble getting started, having severely dehydrated while riding home from the farmer’s market in the heat of the back window. Over the weekend I got a green plastic-coated heavy wire stake with a partial ring to prop up the Victoria Blue. (You can barely see it in the lower left of the picture) Though it now has an unnatural lean away from the sun, it will straighten its course when the sun returns.

Whenever that will be… We’re forecast to have heavy rain all week from Tropical Storm/Depression Lee. The humidity is bathtub high; the plants love humidity and they’ve got it. I’m not as big a fan though the birds don’t seem to mind. I could barely see the brown birds down the electric line loudly chirping their “call and response” but they looked like thrashers. A distant response answered their call.

Nostalgia

When we were young, my sister and I used to walk to the garden center during the summer. It was one of our favorite things to spend our allowance on bedding plants to fill the garden containers my dad made for us out of oil drums. He sliced the drums vertically, welded some kind of feet on them and lined the open edges with a sliced garden hose. Then he filled them with soil.

My sister always bought Sweet Williams (dianthus)--that’s one of the reasons I always grow them. Other reasons are that they are biennials and come back the next year and they bloom like crazy in the spring, continuing to bloom here and there through the summer with another burst in autumn. And for adding easy growing color to the garden, they can’t be beat. It spreads well too, which can be a plus or a minus depending on the setting.