How to stretch the growing season

For any gardener frustrated by a short season, one of the simplest coping strategies is to stretch the season as far as possible.  These tips will show you how.

1. In autumn, cover late season performers with boxes, blankets, or nonwoven season-extending fabric, or floating row cover, to help them survive the first few frosts. Lobelia, pansies, and other diehard annuals will continue to bloom until snow blankets the ground.
2. In addition, many container-grown flowering plants can be cleaned up, pruned back, and brought indoors, where they will continue to colour sunny window sills for several weeks. Given sufficient light, you can coax zonal geraniums to bloom indoors throughout winter months.
3. Outside, stock your landscape with ornamental grasses that form buff-coloured silhouettes that remain attractive well into winter. To ensure that spring comes as early as possible, make liberal use of the small spring-flowering bulbs that appear before the last snow has gone, such as crocus, snowdrops, and squill. When you go outdoors in late winter to admire buds forming on forsythias and flowering cherries, it doubles the excitement to find flowering bulbs pushing up around your feet. Evergreens that withstand prolonged periods of extreme cold include junipers and spruces in assorted shapes and sizes. These are invaluable for keeping the garden furnished through winter months.
4. For a unified look, work with two or three species that offer slight variations in form and texture. If your landscape includes other hardy evergreens, pair them with contrasting shrubby junipers, which come in varying shades of green.

In fall, reward yourself in advance for surviving winter. Plant little bulbs where the snow melts quickly in early spring. Scatter crocus, snowdrops, and squill along the edge of a lawn, a pathway, or close to the edge of a patio or deck where you are sure to notice them.

Asarum, aster, bergenia, birch, black cohosh, cotoneaster, crocus, daffodil, dead nettle, dianthus, Dutchman's pipe, English ivy, euphorbia, false cypress, ferns, forsythia, geranium, goatsbeard, goldenrod, grape hyacinth, hellebore, holly, hyacinth, hydrangea, ironwood, juniper, meadow rue, ornamental grasses, pachysandra, periwinkle, pine, redbud, rose, serviceberry, snowdrops, squill, summersweet, tulip, viburnum, white pine, yellowwood, yucca.