Five Years a Writer

The raised bed / Autumn season / Rooted with hope Where is the line?  Putting the garden to bed for the winter season means making choices. Some are easy. Toss the colourful annuals that have not even slim hope of surviving a Zone 3 winter. Pull out the tomato plants that have done their job, given us jars and jars of beautifully red fruit for our winter enjoyment and put the vegetative waste into bags and bins for compost. Good riddance, in the best sense. But other plants prove more challenging. Two of them, they bloom still. Osteospermums — one white, one yellow. Still perky, colourful, alive. How can I toss them? I know that, ultimately, they must go. But not yet. Not yet. That line is not yet here. Frost has not yet crept into our nights; it will come and when it does, the line will be obvious. No guessing, no wondering required. The blooms will droop and it will be easy to toss the plants, clean the pots, store them away til spring. Frost is the line. But, several years ago, ...