First Freeze

We will have our first freeze tonight.  Temps will drop into the mid-20's.  We spent sometime today talking about freezing temperatures and what that does to plants.  Unfortunately I have a few plants still in their pots from the nursery that I bought in a fit of gardening inspiration last spring but never had time to actually plant them.  Too late to do it now!  We bundled them together close to the house and covered them with a blanket.

We still have lots of tomatoes ripening on the vine and several bell peppers as well.  The kids harvested everything that was close to being ready to pick.  The rest we just covered with a blanket.  It will be neat to see what happens to them either way.

I have 10 rose bushes and they always survive the winter well.  My favorite rose bush is in the front yard on the corner of the house.  It's Belinda's Dream.  I learned about it at an Earth Kind rose seminar I went to many years ago in my life before kids.  Earth Kind roses are amazing.  They need very little care (thank goodness!), little water, no pesticides, etc.  My bush faces the southwest so it gets lots of sunlight.  It has grown much larger than the nursery card said it would grow.  It will bloom in flushes from spring to fall.  And when it blooms, the flowers cover the bush.  They are big flowers too, probably about 4 inches in diameter!

Right now the bush is in full bloom and I would hate to lose all the flowers to the freeze.  We cut some to make a bouquet for our neighbor.  Nicholas delivered it to her.

We cut several more flowers to make a few bouquets for inside the house.  Some were fading when we cut them and just dropped their petals so we also collected the petals in bowls for some fresh potpourri.  But we didn't even cut half of the flowers off the bush.  We left the rest because they were high and farther into the bush which makes them hard to reach without getting tangled in the thorns.