Welcome, Winter…
Just a ‘lil ramble about winter wildlife habitats and my own fears and strategies surrounding freeze damage.
For the past several weeks, I have found myself obsessively thinking about winter weather. Here in Southeast Louisiana, we have a unique conception of this season. We live in a liminal space between tropical and temperate, where the threat of a hard freeze looms without any sense of certainty. These feelings of anxiety are compounded by our general sense of climate dread, as well as by buzzings throughout town about a “Cold Wet Winter” at the hand of El Niño.
One of the things we talk about a lot at Whimscapes is the idea of gardening “with nature.” This means that as seasons and weather change, we adjust our practices accordingly. During the drought this summer, there was a moment where we stopped pulling innocuous weeds because they were providing green mulch and helping maintain soil moisture.
We are now in a new phase of the seasonal wheel, and I’m finding myself worrying about my little backyard ecosystem– my neighborhood cats, my bugs, my birds, and of course, my plants. And so we say (in a meek, unconvincing voice)… “welcome, winter.”
Providing ongoing cold-season food sources for insects and birds is a huge part of gardening “with nature.” We encourage folks to cultivate hollies, pokeberries, and virginia creeper vines, which all provide a lil extra snack in the scarce season to our avian friends. If you don’t have these plants and want to help feed wildlife, work on accepting the aesthetics of spent flowers and seed pods. We are conditioned to be continually seeking colorful blooms in our gardens; by traditional standards, pinks, purples and yellows tend to eclipse the beauty of spindly brown seed heads. We encourage you to challenge this framework.
Eco-conscious gardeners can also provide habitats for insects during these brisk months, especially solitary native bees. Cutting back the stalks of large plants to a height of about two feet creates a little hollow nesting ground for bees. Plants like sunflowers, goldenrods, giant cosmos, and amaranths are great for this practice. If you’ve already cut back your summer blooms, you can create other nesting grounds for these bees. If you’re like us and tend to pile your yard waste in a loose “compost pile,” you’ve already started! That said, bees do prefer vertical nesting, so one great option is to take some of your discarded stalks and assemble them into a small teepee-like structure using string and bamboo.
You can also make or buy a bee hotel. These have become increasingly popular, and can be a great help to native bee populations. It is important in doing this to think carefully about the sizing and quality of the nesting material you use. There are a lot of options– cardboard tubes, hollow reeds, drilled out woodblocks. You can also make one using clay and mud! As a newbie to the world of bee houses, the best I can do is point y’all to existing resources. It’s a fun rabbit hole to go down, try it out.
Habitat and food for critters is totally important, but let’s not pretend that we don’t want our yards to stay pretty. We definitely do. In case of a hard freeze (32 F or below) we always recommend interspersing frost-tolerant plants in your garden. Some of our favorite fairly-cold-tolerant natives include Coral Honeysuckle, Louisiana Irises, and Carolina Jessamine. Many native perennials, like Coreopsis, Rudbeckias (of varying species), Blanket Flowers, and Guara will go dormant or die back to their roots but are very resilient and pop back up in no time.
Though they are not native, calendula, pansies, and alyssum are all frost-tolerant bedding plants and can help support bees and other pollinators throughout the winter. Also have to give a quick shout out to cold season vegetables; they are true heroes of the winter. Brassicas, like broccoli, arugula, cauliflower, kale, and cabbage will tolerate super low temperatures. Beyond being a means of nurturing your own body, the blooms on broccoli and arugula plants are also a favorite of bees and are honestly super adorable in gardens and arrangements.
If you have some tender tropicals or annuals in your yard, freeze protection is always an option. Remember that the heat of the Earth makes in-ground beds a little more resilient. Potted plants generally suffer the most from freezing temperatures, and if possible, they should be brought inside. This is especially relevant for potted trees like citrus and olives!
The morning sun pattern also plays a role in your freeze protection plan. Areas that don’t generally get sun until afternoon are the most susceptible to cold damage because they take longer to warm up with the day. Focus first on these areas.
Our three-part protection plan is as follows: Water. Insulate. Cover.
Water- Even if it feels a little silly, soaking the ground ahead of a freeze will actually help protect your plants. Water holds heat for longer than soil does, so wet soil is the first step for freeze protection.
Insulate- Mulching around the base of your sensitive plants acts as a layer of insulation. This technique is especially useful for larger plants. You can also use strings of incandescent Christmas lights at this stage to provide extra warmth. Make sure your lights are incandescent rather than LED, because LED lights don’t generate heat. In all honesty, this is a kind of wild move that I personally don’t tend to practice. There’s something a little against-nature about using petrol-generated electricity to fight weather patterns, but if you’re a die-hard fan of papayas and monsteras, it is an option.
Cover- Use sheets, blankets and tarps to cover your babies, and you can use bamboo or other stakes to create a tent-like structure so nothing gets smushed. Remember though, the coverings help by trapping the heat from the ground, so make sure your protective covering is flush with the Earth. Stakes, rocks, and bricks are all great options to keep sheets and tarps down. If we have below-freezing temperatures for multiple nights in a row, remove your coverings during the warmer parts of the day to allow your plants to get some sun, then return their cozy coats when the cold of night begins setting back in.
And that’s a wrap on our welcome to winter! At this point it’s big time speculation of what could happen, but for those of us with rattling anxiety brains, it can feel good to mull through the options in advance. As you play outside in these cooler months, try to remember the idea of gardening with nature and strive to find a balance between accepting the seasons as they come and working to maintain your yard as you like it.
