Our first frost arrived this past Thursday! Maybe a little earlier than expected, but still within the normal range. All the tender plants and bulbs are either (1) sitting on a house windowsill, (2) safely tucked away in the barn to dry out a bit, or (3) already slumbering away in the root cellar. All the spring bulbs have (finally!) been planted. Vegetable and flower beds are steadily getting covered or mulched depending on what is left in them. Just about the only tasks left are to plant a few remaining shrubs and do post-frost cleanup. This is the first winter I’ve been this organized, so pardon if I sound overly excited. I might finally be getting the hang of this gardening thing.
1. Aronia mitschurii ‘Viking’ lines part of our driveway and always provides lovely color in the cold season. It is usually laden with berries until after December, but it looks like the birds got to them early this year. One of these days, I might get around to picking some for the juice, but we are usually so overrun with berries by this late in the season that I can’t muster the energy to do another round.
2. Rodgersia aesculifolia’s big leaves look like they’ve been sprinkled with powdered sugar.
3. In the cutting garden, Rudbeckia hirta ‘Prairie Sun’ and Antirrhinum braun-blanquetii are some of the last few still standing.
4. Summer crops beds, harvested and tucked in for the winter. I’m not the only one who insists on saving all the cardboard pizza boxes for this purpose, am I? The new row of beds to the left is being filled with assorted garden waste to break down in place over the winter. These covered beds will get a fresh topping of compost in the spring before new plants go in.
5. I got this set of wire towers on a whim. They’re cute but on the short side. Not sure what I’m going to use them for (sweet peas maybe?), but they’ll be nice for winter interest when everything else is covered in snow.
6. Shredded newspaper mulch! I started doing this a few years ago and it worked out so well that I’ve gone larger scale with it this year. The parts of the flower bed that I planted with spring bulbs, as well as the vegetable beds housing perennials, are covered in hand-shredded newspaper. The paper gets wet and freezes in position, leaving gaps for air under it. Then the snow covers everything, providing a nice insulating layer. The worms munch away on their paper buffet all winter, cozy and protected. The majority is broken down by the time spring rolls around, when a fresh layer of compost covers the rest!
Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!
Little Blue and White House 
Oh I like the newspaper shredding idea. Perhaps I should give that a go?
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It’s worth a try! I’d test it on one small area first, to get the proportions right. Too thick a layer may take longer to disintegrate than you’d like, though I don’t think that’s really much of an issue since you have all the winter and a good portion of spring. Our combination of acidic soil, copious snow and enthusiastic worms works out well enough that I can get away with ripping it in strips instead of finer, for example. I’ve also read that it’s something that needs to be balanced out with enough nitrogen so that it doesn’t hurt the nutrients in the soil, but of course most of us are adding compost regularly, so it’s not that big a deal.
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Thank you, I shall bare all this in mind.
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Great frosty pictures and that was interesting regarding the shredded newspaper mulch.
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Thanks! It was mostly a whim the first time I tried it, but Google has since told me that it’s not that uncommon a thing!
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Oh look at the frost!
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It’s prettier to look at in a toasty house, let me tell you 😀
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Can frost be pretty and annoying at the same time?
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Oh, absolutely! Especially when it can’t be bothered to turn into actual winter but then reverts to wishy washy just above 0 autumn again, so I feel the need to keep on working on whatever errands I can “to get ahead in the spring”….
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I’m surprised to see that you don’t protect your rodgersia from frost. Here I cover it with thick mulch, but maybe that’s not necessary? Ah ah you collect the pizza boxes, I collect the Amazon boxes and I did the same thing this morning. Newspaper shredding is interesting, but here if it’s windy I find pieces everywhere in the garden or I have to cover it immediately with mowing grass. But it’s a good idea!
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Nope, no protection whatsoever on the rodgersia! It’s super hardy right where it is, and springs back with several large shoots every spring 🙂 It does have a decent layer of pine needles at its base, from sharing the bed with a large evergreen shrub that also protects it from the worst of the elements, though… And yes, we are also using Amazon boxes as well lol. I make sure to do the newspaper mulch right before we are due to have some light rain, so that it absorbs enough water to stay in place. Otherwise, you’d be absolutely right about it blowing everywhere!
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I won’t add such thick mulch on my rodgersia now…
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I think we all like your newspaper shredding, we’ll all be having a go! What a good use for your pizza boxes, don’t eat pizza but could save my amazon boxes like Fred! Stay warm in your frost!
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It’s really no much different than any other brown material mulch, yet there’s something so satisfying about ripping it to pieces 😀 Thank you and hope that autumn is treating you kindly!
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Pretty frosty photos, Angela. Definitely spells the end of the gardening season!
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But, alas, not the end of cleaning up! 😭
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The frost looks lovely but reminded me of how much I have to do! I must get on with protecting the few tender plants I have. I shred my cardboard boxes for the compost heap. It helps balance out all the grass clippings I have.
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There is always something more to do, isn’t there? No matter how much I finish, there’s always just one more task…
Yep, I mulch the area with grass clippings during the summers as well, so it all sort of balances out in the long run. I’m doing a big chop and drop with the majority of those areas, so all that green material also joins the paper mulch. Pretty much a compost-in-place sort of thing!
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Oh, you’re well organised indeed, I‘m impressed. 😁 no way I could plant any bulbs right now as the soil is still like concrete after the drought. No pizza cardboard boxes in this household though as we make our pizza in our pizza/bread oven. Looking forward to see your spring bulbs🙏
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Oh dear, I had hoped that the autumn rains would help everything recover for you guys 😦 Weather has definitely gotten very unpredictable over the last several years!
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It’s raining now but it‘ll take a while for plants to recover and turn green again.
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Such a pretty frost in your garden too! It looked a bit sad after purs, butvthe annuals have now been chopped down. Newspaper mulch sounds like such a good idea, but we do have a lot of wind here, so I will stick to grass and straw I think… some plants get evergreen branches over them too.
The pizza box idea is also great for covering up the vegetable plot. 👍
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Interested in seeing your aronia, because I’ve been wondering about getting one for the berries. It’s got lovely autumn colour.
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It’s a great shrub, I highly recommend it! The ones we have are especially huge and productive, and my neighbors have just planted a hedge with a dwarf variety that’s looking very healthy as well. Your comment actually sent me to look back through my archives to see if I had any photos of it in full bloom/fruit over the past years. Alas, I do not so I will have to wait until next year before I can do a garden inventory on it!
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