When the forecast started showing a frost/freeze warning for Tuesday night, my first thought was: “No biggie. We’ll just bring the garden into the house.”
And so we did.
The careful reader will recall that Kindra, my lower back and I decided to forego the traditional garden-in-theground and instead planted one in containers, specifically 18-gallon tubs and five-gallon buckets.
The tubs are for the potatoes and tomatoes, for now, and the buckets for everything else.
It has been a success thus far. The plants are healthy and easy to water and my back has rejoiced at not having to bend over.
So, with the prediction of a frost threatening our movable garden, we found ourselves in the enviable position of just bringing the garden inside with us.
We spread cardboard on the tile, kind of like you might spread a blanket for an outdoor dog spending the night inside, and shared our humble home with the carrots, radishes and other such things that have sprouted.
They’re quiet and peaceful guests, these vegetables, and they seemed to get along well with the houseplants, with the possible exception of the Venus fly trap.
The 18-gallon tubs were a touch too big for the house, so I suggested we use the coffee can approach that was standard gardening practice when I was a kid.
People used to save their coffee cans to put over their tomatoes or other tender plants when a late-season cold snap threatened them.
Veteran gardeners who’d been saving cans for years often cut the bottoms out of their extras to make cylinders they could slide over the tomato plants and into the ground in warm weather as protection from cutworms.
It was a common sight to see a long string of such cans on a wire on a garden fence.
Nowadays, with the advent of one-cup coffee makers and instant coffee like I often use, there aren’t many coffee cans to be had.
So, we decided to make do with buckets of various sizes over the tomato plants and into the ground a bit.
The potato plants were too husky to cover, so we left them to fend for themselves. If they lose a few leaves, they’ll grow them back.
When we opted for the container garden, I didn’t figure on sharing my office or the entry with buckets of carrots and radishes, but hey.
It was better than replanting.