We had a frost on Tuesday night. I cut a bunch of dahlias to enjoy inside, and made my peace with things. And while I did have to scrape my car to go to work in the morning, temps must have hovered around 32 degrees, because everything’s still alive. That includes the basil (middle picture above) and peppers (third picture), which are usually delicate snowflakes, and should totally be dead.
The dahlias are not very happy to be here – all the open flowers I didn’t cut and a lot of the top foliage crisped right up, but they are alive, and the buds are starting to bloom this weekend. But the funniest thing is the following:
This is Dark Monarch. This flower greeted me from the compost pile this morning. I thought this was dead when I took the tubers out in the spring – it was terribly desiccated, and nothing was sprouting. So into the compost pile it went. I did notice a month or so ago that a dahlia plant was poking out of the top of the pile. (It’s the old pile, so we didn’t add anything this year, and it grew some lush squash plants.) It was so sheltered from the frost that the foliage still looks great. This flower is totally sideways, but it’s there. So I’ll be rescuing these tubers and seeing what they do next year.