Garden Centre

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Gardening in Snow

If your garden is anything like mine, today, it’s frozen solid with small drifts and layers of snow from yesterday that didn’t melt. Snow is rare in Southern England and snow that stays for more than a few hours is rarer still, so many of my plants are having their first experience of this unusual situation.

Almost all native plants will cope well with snow and heavy frost, especially if it happens early in winter – the problem comes when extreme weather arrives late in February or even in March, when sap has started to rise in the plants and buds may even have opened, and then the plants’ new growth will be blighted by the freezing of watery sap that literally explodes the plant cells, leading to rot.

There are several things you can do to minimise the effects of extreme weather on your garden. The first and most important is to stay away from high-nitrogen fertilisers as they encourage plants to make lots of sappy leafy growth – this growth is then very liable to that exploding cell situation, even in the lightest frost.

The second step, if you live in an area prone to heavy frost, is to leave your pruning until spring. If you have last year’s growth on tender plants over the winter, it will protect the new inner growth and if it is damaged it doesn’t matter, because you’re going to cut it away from the plant as soon as the frost risk is over.

Something that many people don’t realise is that chilled air and frost always descend to the lowest point of your land and stay their longest, so if you have delicate plants, avoid putting them in dips and dells in your garden as they will be exposed to potentially damaging frost for much longer that plants on higher ground.

If you have snow, you need to calculate your risks. If you have heavy snow and it looks like staying around, you may want to go and shake it off the branches of trees and larger shrubs so they won’t be damaged by its weight. On the other hand, remember that shaking fragile branches is likely to snap them, especially if they are already frozen, so it may be better to let light snow melt away on its own.

You should always remove snow from greenhouses and cold frames to let in the light if you have plants inside. It also stops them bending under the weight.

Above all you mustn’t walk on snow-covered lawns, put down planks if you have to cross the grass, or you’ll end up with dead areas of lawn.

Labels: all year gardening, garden frost, garden in snow

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:44 AM

---