you can create a nice Zone 8-ish spot in a colder Zone 7 garden by employing a few gardening tricks:
Safety in numbers: Planting less-hardy plants in groups helps make them more resilient and better able to withstand temperature extremes and drying winds. The local humidity is likely to be higher in a crowd, too.
Mulch: A layer of organically rich mulch moderates soil-temperature fluctuations. It also helps hold in soil moisture so you don’t have to worry about lack of rain or having to water quite as much.
Heat traps: These structures help retain heat. Row covers, hot caps, and cold frames (see Figure 3-2) are well-known ways to trap heat, thus raising the immediate temperature and/or protecting vulnerable plants from cold weather. You can purchase heat traps or build your own. If you want to get fancy, you can add a heating cable to the soil of the cold frame with a thermostat. Then it becomes a hot bed or a miniature greenhouse.© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.FIGURE 3-2: Putting a cold frame to efficient use.
Water: Proximity to water has a moderating effect on temperature, so you may have luck pampering a slightly tender plant by growing it next to a water feature on your property (natural or artificial).
Wind and sun blocks: Fences, walls, buildings, and other structures offer shelter from drying winds and blasts of snow. Warmth and humidity can build up close to them, allowing you to coddle some tender plant. They often also create more shade, which can be cooling or inhibiting, depending on your plant’s needs. You can make a simple inexpensive temporary cold frame with bales of hay, placed in a rectangle and covered with a glass window or door sash.
Bending the rules to stretch your growing season
Maybe it’s the rebel in you, me, and all gardeners. Maybe it’s natural restlessness. Maybe it’s an urge to make maximum and efficient use of available time. But gardeners do like to try to push the envelope in order to grow more or better or different plants.
You can dig up many tricks and techniques along these lines, and you certainly may come up with a few of your own as your experience grows. The following sections describe some favorite rule-benders that you can try if appropriate to your garden, your needs, and your climate.
Incorporating warming tricks
If frost will damage a plant, perhaps you can still have it outdoors by shielding it somehow. This idea applies both to setting plants out a bit too early in the spring and leaving them in the garden a bit too late in the fall.
Use row covers, blankets, water walls (heavy pieces of plastic that have sections filled with water that holds heat) burlap, plastic sheeting, or extra mulch (compost, weed-free hay, pine straw, which is actually pine needles), or pine boughs. Water well; hydrated roots can withstand cold and drought better.
JACK FROST AT BAY
You may find you tried to stretch the growing season a little too far, or perhaps the weather experts missed the mark on the date of the final frost. A big chill is creeping up, and you’ve already used mulch and blankets as much as you can to keep the plants warm. What’s a gardener to do? Try a little emergency frost protection.
Spray vulnerable plants with water to slow or prevent plant injury caused by chilling (as Florida orange growers know all too well when a rare frost threatens). How does this work? Cold, dry air tends to draw the moisture out of leaves and from the ground; the spray of water raises the humidity levels, which in turn reduces moisture loss. Also, in order for water vapor to condense or for water to freeze, the water has to release heat, which in turn warms the plant. The plants need to be kept wet until the danger of freezing has passed; using a sprinkler system is the most practical way.
Bringing the plants inside
Potted plants, provided they’re not too big or heavy, may be pretty easy to move indoors for a time. Most plants tend to grow less and be less productive or unproductive during the winter months, so you also want to reduce water and plant food. You may even cut the plants back and just keep the pots moist enough to keep the roots alive until spring returns.
Prized plants or special herbs that you want to save can also come inside when you dig them up out of the garden and put them in a pot. Again, they may not grow full force, but you can try to keep them alive. They may experience cooler temperatures inside but not the hard frost that would damage or kill them outdoors. If you plan to enjoy these plants longer, give them a warm and sunny spot on a windowsill or insulated sunroom. Water and feed moderately, and keep an eye out for pests.
To save space, you may want to cut these plants and root them indoors before planting them outside in warmer weather. See Chapter 10 for more information.
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