Winter is quickly approaching and it’s important to know how to protect your plants from colder temperatures, wind, and occasional freezes. Even though our area is known for milder winters it’s still important to protect tender plants. One of the advantages of living in Visalia and throughout the Central Valley is our ability to garden year-round. While others are shoveling snow, we can still be working dirt and compost throughout our productive winter gardens. Even with our milder winters, we still need to protect our outdoor plants.

What do we need to protect them from?

Zone 9 provides winter evenings that are generally mild, but occasionally we will have short frost periods and occasionally hard freezes. What do we do if there is a hard freeze? On nights that have hard freezes you will want to protect your plants from the cold. You can use some common household items, or purchase special commercial products designed to protect your plants.

What do we do to protect them?

To protect your plants from a freeze you can take a few steps to keep them safe:

1. Bring them indoors – If you have container gardens, you can bring your plants inside for the evening. Even moving them into the garage or a room for just the night can warm them and protect them from a long freeze.
2. Use cotton blankets – Covering your plants with a cotton blanket overnight is a way to protect them from a hard freeze. You can even use a hand warmer packet under the soil to help the temperature under the blanket to stay in a comfortable range for your plants. The blanket should only stay on during cold periods. Do not leave it on when the temperatures rise again, or you will have a very unhappy plant.
3. Water before the freeze – Water your plants before the day of the freeze and this will help to add insulation to the soil and plant cells. Damp soil ironically stays warmer than dry soil. If you want to keep your plant warm… keep your soil warm.
4. Mulch to protect the roots – Roots can regrow if kept alive over winter. Apply 2-3 inches of mulch on top of the soil and it will act as an insulating blanket. Mulch will preserve moisture, moderate soil temps and reduce weeds.
5. Protect your pots – potted plants can be wrapped in burlap, cloth or plastic to keep them from being exposed and vulnerable to winter cold.

What are some good winter crops?

Due to our milder winters, there are several crops that will do quite well here in the winter. You can plant lettuce, spinach, cabbage, peas, carrots, broccoli, celery, cauliflower and more. You will not have to worry about your leafy greens bolting to seed this time of year and your broccoli and cabbage will grow quite well.

We hope that following these simple tips will lead to a happier and healthier garden. Please feel free to stop on buy Luis’ Nursery and we can answer any questions you might have!