It hasn't been quite as cold as predicted the past couple of days. 29° on Friday night and 30° on Saturday night, according to weather.com. And the cold damage has been much less severe than I had feared.
There is some bad news: first, the heliotrope I bought a week ago is a goner. I had no idea they had so little cold tolerance. We put a little straw over it, but not much, and most of it blew away during the night. There's a teeny tiny bit of green at the bottom of the plant, which may well be gone tomorrow. Oh well, I love the smell of heliotrope and it wasn't expensive, so I'll buy another if this one dies.
All the nasturtium seedlings died. I put straw on all the other seedlings, but I forgot all about these guys. There's still time to try again with another seed packet. But honestly, I have such bad luck with nasturtiums every year that I wonder if this is a sign.
Some of the straw blew off the gerber daisies and a few of them look frozen. I expect the plants will come back though. As will the beautyberry, which lost most of its foliage. The butterfly bush also looks pretty droopy, but it will bounce right back.
Also the hydrangeas took some damage. The plants will be fine but we may have fewer flowers this year. This one wasn't a surprise, so I'm a bit bummed but not crushed.
Now the good news: most of the garden looks fine. The spinach and sugar snaps took no damage, with no protection at all. As did the roses; even the flower buds (which a couple of them have, to my delight) look untouched. And all the seedlings I remembered to cover with straw survived: basil, snapdragons, bee balm and butterfly weed. Also no damage to the blueberries, or the cilantro, or the verbascum we just planted. And the fig looks great too! I'm so happy that the fig made it through the winter.
We brought a bunch of plants inside for the night, so many that the kitchen is basically unusable. Here's hoping it warms up soon so we can put everything back outside!
Today we had our first harvest from the garden! Georg picked some spinach for a wonderful lamb and chickpea stew. Actually it was called a stew, but it was in broth rather than a gravy, so kind of more like a really hearty soup. So good. It hit the spot on a cold night.
Weather.com is predicting 26° tonight, which is a little alarming. But they were way off last night ( their prediction was 5 degrees colder than the actual low) so I'm not going to worry. Besides, we've done as much as we can reasonably do to protect the plants. If they're going to live, then they're going to live.
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