Winterizing the Garden
Not as pretty as it sounds. Kind of looks like a crime scene in spots?
I do like the look of a dying garden in winter, but not this one. Which is why I feel slightly sheepish about sending out this post, especially to all of you recent subscribers who found your way over via the very lovely Field Notes (Hi! Welcome! I promise my garden usually looks nicer than this). But beauty and practicality don’t always mix, and we are in a very practical moment here on the terrace. It’s suddenly cold, and the plants are currently in their winter coats, and the coats aren’t pretty. (evidence: photos below)
Up until late November Brooklyn was fairly warm still, not very rainy, and the garden was looking ok until last weekend’s freeze. Before that freeze I had to rush outside and get the garden put to bed in a hurry. A sad thing to do when you still have flowers, but it was good timing at least, to be able to cut almost every single leftover flower in the garden and put it on the Thanksgiving table.
I did leave a lot of the dying stuff out in the garden. Annuals, mostly: things like verbena and sunflowers and celosia. In Carroll Gardens the long, landscaped front yards are full of dying plants that look lovely and romantic—very wispy and blowing in the breeze. They don’t so lovely here, not in pots at least. I’ve already written about these feelings and how I need to learn to embrace my garden in its less-than-pretty states, but obviously I still haven’t managed to do that. I do feel tempted to pull out every dying annual and cut off every seedhead—it would certainly look nicer—but I’m leaving it all for the birds/squirrels/possible rats. I guess I’m trying to keep the Christmas spirit alive out here.
Anyhow the point isn’t to make the garden look good now—it’s to get it ready and keep it protected so that it can look good next year. These are the steps I’ve taken; mind you I can’t promise these methods will work, but I’m hoping they will, especially for the roses, which I love the most.
Taking away the Terracotta
I got scared off of buying terracotta pots by many of the container gardening books I’ve read. Most terracotta (unless it’s high-fired/expensive) can break in winter temperatures and isn’t the most practical thing to grow in if you don’t have a shed or greenhouse or somewhere to safely house it in the winter. If I need a huge container to grow in (say, for my roses) I get a plastic one. But fairly often I’ll find terracotta pots being given away here on local front stoops, and I have a hard time resisting taking them home with me. I figure that if they break, at least they were free.
But I don’t want them to break. Especially the larger ones. They do look so much nicer than the plastic pots, and even though I told myself I was only going to grow annuals in the terracotta pots, I did plant in the odd perennial. So those had to be taken out, of course. I was left with a lot more terracotta pots than I thought I had, so what to do with them?
Well, I planted bulbs in some of them, hiding them away from the cold and rain in a deck storage box. Fingers crossed. The smallest and the nicest-looking of the pots came inside with me for indoor paperwhite and amaryllis bulbs and also for all of the scented geraniums that live on the windowsills in winter. A few are in my mini cold frames (more on those in a second), but the rest? I piled together the terracotta pots I’m not using, and tarped them with IKEA bags for protection. I’m not sure it will work, but it was worth a shot. I’ve read that the reason why terracotta can break in winter is because it can soak up water, and a very repetitive freeze/thaw cycle is too much for it, so I’m hoping the makeshift tarp will help. I’m also keeping the pots on the side of the terrace that gets less sun.
As you can see in the photo above I didn’t do the greatest job covering up the empty pots. It’s cold out! My fingers hurt—the worst part of winterizing the garden, absolutely. And after I finished up I came across a blog post by my heroine Martha Stewart on how she winterizes her fragile urns and pots, and of course it made me feel even worse about the job I did. She covers pots with plastic and burlap, and sews the burlap closed. (Or at least she has her staff do it) I don’t have staff, or yards and yards of burlap. I have a few IKEA bags and a little bit of hope, so I’m hoping that will be enough.
Protecting the Perennials
So most of my winterizing was spent taking all of the plants out of the terracotta, and getting rid of the annuals and transplanting the perennials. I do have a few raised garden beds on the terrace that always have extra space, so after cutting the perennials back a bit I crammed them together in the raised beds. Will this work? I hope so. It did for me last year; some of those plants went so dormant I could have sworn they were dead, but tiny little buds popped out in the spring, and every plant ended up surviving. But then again it wasn’t exactly a harsh winter.
The reason I’m planting as many perennials as I can in the raised beds is because I’ve read that the bigger the container, the better protected the plants will be in wintertime. Planting them in the ground would provide the best protection, but I don’t have ground to plant them in, so raised beds will have to do. That said, I do have a lot of plants in some larger pots, all huddled together in a corner of the terrace; they like to be cozy, too.
Some expert advice from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden:
When planting in containers, even choosing plants hardy in your region is no guarantee that they will survive the winter. Many experts suggest that to better the odds of a plant's survival, choose one marked as hardy in two zones colder than your area. For example, if you garden in Zone 7, choose perennials, trees, and shrubs marked hardy to Zone 5 to increase the chance that the plants will survive the winter. When possible, use large containers for plants that must remain outdoors—the greater volume of soil surrounding the plants will provide increased insulation around the roots.
I do have some plants in small pots, but I’m overwintering them in the plastic bin cold frames and mini IKEA greenhouse. It’s nothing too precious—mostly little violas I’m trying to grow for the spring. I planted way too many from seed.
Rigging up the Roses
It’s not a huge deal if the violas don’t make it, but if the roses don’t pull through the winter I know I’ll cry. I love them. I’ve had Carding Mill for two years, and the mystery David Austin (supposed to be Windermere but it looks like Queen of Sweden?) for almost one year, and I’ve already formed emotional attachments to them.
Last year when I started researching how to over-winter roses bushes in containers I started to wonder why I even bother trying to grow roses in pots. All the how-to articles scared me with all of their strict instructions and warnings. So drastic! I ended up taking most of their advice, but in my own way, and since my Carding Mill came through just fine last time, I’m doing the same thing this time.
A very helpful article on the American Rose Society’s site suggests that you force your roses into dormancy before putting them to bed for the winter, so I pruned mine just a bit and then took all the leaves off. Is this a horrible idea? I didn’t do it last winter, but the article told me to do it, and it is a lot more satisfying to wrap up the rose when it’s looking like a bare root plant that just arrived in the mail. Very clean-looking. I watered the plants, mounding the bases up with extra potting mix.
The article also recommends wrapping the outside of the pot in black plastic, but I found it lots easier to snip a few drainage holes at the bottom of an IKEA bag and put the entire pot right in, securing it around the top of the container with some jute. Then I took some burlap and wrapped it around the sides of the canes, (but not the tops—the plants need to be able to access water) also tying it up with jute string. I did a sloppy job of it and Martha would be horrified, and I probably do need to go outside and fix it up before we get a snowstorm, but it works for now. I also made sure to put the two roses in the most sheltered corner on the terrace. Both on the shadier side and against a wall that will hopefully serve as a windbreak.
Some warnings from the article:
Do not move the roses from this pen until the last threat of freeze has passed! Prematurely moving roses out of this pen, even if they are breaking dormancy, can result in the death of the plants in the event of a late freeze. Also, do not forget to water your roses! The roses in pots cannot be allowed to have their roots dry out as the plant then runs the risk of death from desiccation.
Desiccation! I didn’t even think about watering my rose last year, but I guess I’ll be paying closer attention this year. Though not too much attention. Where I go wrong in the garden is usually when I over-care and coddle. This winter my goal is to let nature to do its thing, but to give it a little bit of help when necessary. Not too much, though. Mostly I'll just be keeping an occasional eye on the terrace and a constant eye on the weather app.
