Kitchen Garden Forum

I went out this morning to feed the animals and there was a heavy frost on the ground. As the pigs emerged from their ark, steam rose off the roof of the ark, visible in the frosty air.

Dear Jane E, a good frost here too yesterday morning, forgot how pretty it makes eveyrthing look.

Heck of a frost here too, cars frozen solid but amazingly my fuschias survived!

Back to rain today so I'm told

We've had our first freexe too - the bird bath was frozen over!

Yep same here. Been digging and cleaning Dahlia tubers the last couple of days that got knocked over on Monday night. Guess they were the last of the Autumn Bliss I had on Monday too.

We put a Banana tree and Avocado bush into one of the borders in the garden this year (they'd outgrown the conservatory they were in). I'd been given advice on what to do when winter returned and have been waiting with trepidation.

After Monday night, I went out and put a really Heath Robinson arrangement round the trunk of the banana: a retaining tube made of plastic mesh fencing, with a good stuffing of straw. There's fleece round the outside to stop driving rain getting in, yet allow it to breath over the next few months. The top has some plastic to minimise rain running down the trunk.

A friend advises that (if this is done properly) the frost will kill off the leaves & top quarter of the tree, but new growth usually emerges from the remaining stem some time in the Spring. If we ever actually achieve this, I will of course let you all know .

The Avocado is a more tricky customer. It's not that big (around 4 feet across and around 3 feet high). I just don't know how to stop any straw I insulate it with getting saturated without some sort of umbrella arrangement above it. Any ideas gratefully received!

Coilin,
We have had a few banana plants in our garden for a few years now - some have developed into clumps as babies grew. Each year we chop them down to about a couplt of feet and do what you have done cover with straw. This is removed in spring once the frosts have passed.

Being a herbaceous plant rather than a tree they just shoot from the middle of the cut stem and are soon off again the next season.

It also does depend on your variety of banana - ours are musa basjoo which are fairly hardy but many bananas won't survive even after the straw treatment.

Hi Colin

Why don't you use an old umbrella frame over your
avocado. Cover it with plastic at the top but something
like environmesh around the sides with the straw tucked
in.

In an attempt (unsuccessful) to stop the birds getting all
my cherries I nailed an old broken brolley to a stake and
threw the netting over the top which meant it stood clear
of the tree a bit and did not knock any cherries off if the
wind got up. The cheeky birds just pushed down the netting
and ate the cherries through the gaps.

Westi

Geoff wrote:Yep same here. Been digging and cleaning Dahlia tubers the last couple of days that got knocked over on Monday night. Guess they were the last of the Autumn Bliss I had on Monday too.

We leave our dahlias in the ground and cover them with straw and then black polythene - they have survived like this in a clay soil for several years now.

Westi wrote:Why don't you use an old umbrella frame over your
avocado.

What we actually ended up doing was putting one of those plastic mini-greenhouses over the Avocado (the ones that look like an upright cold frame). We've left the opening partially unzipped and stuffed some straw around the base of the avocado.

That looks like it might do the trick. Just hope no local rodents decide to take up residence in it over winter

As a postscript to this thread, I thought I'd mention that whilst the snow in Bristol hasn't been that heavy, it was enough to weigh down the branches of our olive tree.

It's been growing in our garden for several years now and must be around 10-12' high with a trunk around 3" in diameter. However on Tuesday morning it was bent double. It's not thawed enough since then to shake enough off the branches but I hope to be able to get it upright soon.

At least the olives will be the right temperature for our traditional New Year's Eve Martinis