frost

Very early this morning, the temperature bottomed out at 18F, so my max-min thermometer tells me. And yet, when I looked out my window, there was not a speck of frost on the grass. If I hadn't consulted the thermometer, I would have thought it was a lovely spring day out there. (The grass has [...]

Stumbled across a link to an excellent synopsis of frost and its effects via @urbangarden. If you don't have a copy of A Gardener's Guide to Frost, this is the next best thing.

Lee Valley is selling remaindered copies of A Gardener's Guide to Frost: Outwit the Weather and Extend the Spring and Fall Seasons for only $7. This has got to be the best book for cold climate gardeners that I've read, but hardly anyone seems to know about it. (Read my review of A Gardener's Guide [...]

I hate the plants that can survive a cold winter but can't take a hard spring frost. It is so aggravating! The problem is they emerge too early from dormancy for their own good. I'm talking about: 'Endless Summer' hydrangea. It will get through a USDA Zone 4 winter but break into leaf long before [...]

Don't get me wrong--I love snowdrops, winter aconites, crocus and all the very earliest bloomers that signal the end of winter's dominion. But here in the land of late and unseemly freezes, plants that emerge later have the advantage. Those poor 'Black Beauty' lilies in the photo above were seduced by the atypical but not [...]

Last night the National Weather Service issued a frost advisory for our area, and we did indeed get a frost. They are issuing a freeze warning for tonight. What's the difference? I contacted a member of the local weather station staff. He told me that Both [the frost advisory and the freeze warning] are only [...]

I saw frost in shady lawn this a.m., but coleus, cosmos, dahlias all look fine. Just that one spot, I guess.

In Part 1 I mentioned the two hard frosts and a freeze we had recently, all of them rather later in the season than is typical. I illustrated how different species in the same genus reacted to the freeze differently, and also gave examples of plants that were damaged even though they were protected. Sometimes [...]

Part of what makes my cold climate garden cold is the fact that we live in the bottom of a valley, and cold air flows downhill and settles all around us. So however cold the weatherman predicts it will get, it's usually colder here. Often, ten degrees colder. For example, on May 12th, when a [...]