Liz posted a question in the Forum that comes up just about every fall. She's moving and wants to take some of her perennials with her, but she won't have a yard to put them in until spring. She wants to know how she can keep them alive until then. Oh, and she's in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Marlingardener is an experienced gardener who has weathered upstate NY winters. She gave Liz some excellent advice: "... pot them up, water them well, put them where the pots will not freeze (the top growth naturally goes dormant, but it is the roots you need to preserve) and water them infrequently during the storage period. Dark isn't as important as cool but not freezing. If you have doubts, put all the pots together and surround them with straw, hay, whatever material you can easily get, as a mulch for the pots." Here are a few more tips that have worked for me, when I needed to protect my containers, as well as some suggestions from other gardeners in a variety of climates. If you have some suggestions to add, please do. We need all the ideas we can get.
Photo: © Marie Iannotti
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In the winter I store my containers on my front porch under two very long benches. The annuals do die down but the seeds from the annuals are left. When warm weather arrives in Spring I pull them out into the sun, cut them back and new plantlettes will soon start to form. I get extra “Wave Petunias, Lady Victoria Salvias.” Divide the plants when they get taller and put in other containers.
I also store some Very large containers (18″ or larger) between our garden shed and compost piles, tilt them on their sides so they will drain, over the freeze and thaw cylces of Winter.
What a great idea for areas that only need a zone or 2 of protection. You get to keep the marginal plants, like your Wave petunias and Salvia and t’s a nice way to get a head start on self-seeders.
And that’s a really good point about tilting the pots so they don’t turn into soil popsicles.
use bubble wrap and keep pots off the ground.
wrap in old fern or gunnera leaves
Now that’s recycling, using old leaves for insulation.
Has anyone tried Fleece, it’s pretty good insulation, maybe not for very cold climates… But a fleece covering will stop most frosts taking hold. Just an idea.
I use the Oak leaves from my tree around the flower beds. They seem to insulate well against the Oregon winter. Then I clean those up and make a compost with them to enrich the soil.
Happy Holidays
Someone submitted a gardening tip about using tomato cages to frame winter insulation. They’d work great with either the fleece or leaves. And it means you won’t have to find a place to store them for the winter.
I live in chilly Colorado, and I have a potting shed, so I put the potted plants under the floor of the potting shed for the winter.
Well now that’s clever. A root cellar under the potting shed. Excellent planning.