November snow

Snow in November isn’t unprecedented – I can recall at least one very bad snowstorm some years ago – but it’s not usual.  November has been a relatively mild month on the whole, and not particularly wet as Novembers go, but this weekend we were hit by Storm Arwen that brought high winds, some light snow and sub-zero temperatures.  Our area was affected much less than others, but Saturday in particular was windy and bitterly cold outdoors, and the cold has continued through the weekend; reasonably mild today, reverting to something more normal for the rest of the week.

For reasons mostly beyond my control, I’m a few weeks behind with my gardening schedule, no garden work having been done since mid-October.  One of the jobs left undone is lifting the dahlias and taking them into the greenhouse.  Actually this is not entirely unreasonable; dahlias ought to be left until their foliage has started to blacken with the first frost, and that didn’t happen until Saturday, but they have gone from slightly tatty but definitely green to flattened and definitely black in the space of 24 hours.  I hope they haven’t been frozen too hard, especially those (the majority) in pots.  My little red chrysanthemums, in contrast, have bounced back as soon as the snow melted from on top of them, a very small beacon of colour on the patio in an otherwise rather sad-looking garden.

Little red chrysanths, with blackened dahlia behind

A sad-looking garden

The dahlias haven’t done well this year, and I have to admit that it’s mostly my fault.  I haven’t been a particularly attentive gardener these past months, I have to confess.  I started by cutting one corner: last winter was relatively mild, and partly because of that and partly in order to be ‘green’ I didn’t insulate the greenhouse, and only switched on the heater on a couple of especially cold nights; spring was mostly chilly, and when May came along (the usual time to put dahlias outdoors) I took the view that gradual hardening off was unnecessary, since the outdoor temperatures were little different to those that the greenhouse had been registering for a long time.  The dahlias didn’t seem to suffer from this.  However I then hit my usual problem of finding enough space in the ground and in pots to accommodate them, and finding time to do all the potting up; some of the smaller dahlia tubers are still sitting outside in the small pots in which they were brought into leaf.  Not only did this mean that they put on minimal growth and therefore the tubers won’t be in great shape, but being left out in small pots in cold weather will probably result in them being killed off.  We shall see.  Even those dahlias that were planted up didn't flower well; I admit to not having been careful about watering and feeding.  I had already been having thoughts about the number of cuttings and other small plants that I have hanging around in search of a home, and being more realistic about how many plants I can handle; that’s a subject for another post.  In the meantime, I shall have to take a good look at all my little pots and see what has survived.