Uh Oh!

This is what my garden looked like early this morning. We had night frost of about - 6 C (21 F) last night and this is the result.
Gaaaaaaaa, just look at my poor greenpointed snowdrops, they looked like this (below), before the frost and how sad they look now, prostrate on the earth.
The fennel in my potager is feeling decidedly very sorry for itself too,
and so is the Bergenia.
The Periwinkle has folded up its flower leaves,
and my poor daisies are not feeling like happy bunnies right now! Brrrrrrr
My poor Hellebore is doing the droopy thing too.
This is always a worry when you get such mild temperatures in January and early February and the garden wakes up. Many a bloom or bud is tender and visits from the Ice Queen during the day and/or night are still very common in the early months of the year and can do a lot of damage in the garden. It is usually around half May that the danger of (light) night frost is gone in my part of the Netherlands.
Fortunately, a lot of the bulbs can stand a bit of frost and before you know it,both the daffodils and the grape hyacinths will look their cheerful self again.
These little dafs were enjoying the early sunshine this morning and were feeling much better than their cousins still in the clutches of the Ice Queen who reigned in the shade.

But it is not only the plants I have to worry about. I noticed that the rainwater in my watering can has frozen too. It is not a solid block of ice yet, which is a relief as I had forgotten to empty it out last night. I'll just put the watering can in my conservatory where the ice can do the melty thing. I don't want my can to spring a leak by letting the water get frozen from top to bottom, as it would be totally useless then.

It was not only the outside garden that provided me with some uh oh moments this morning, inside I found a nasty surprise too.
Argh! Whitefly on my little lime tree in the conservatory, this is not of the good!
I don't want to lose those limes, nor the blossom and it doesn't bear thinking about losing the whole lime tree. So off it went, straight into the
bathroom for a good clean in the bath.
Tralaaaaaa, here it's having a shower and look how
squeeky clean it is once again and all those nasty whiteflies are gone. Well, for the moment they are. This probably means that my lime tree will need a shower once a week until it's May and it can go outside. Once it's outside, the natural predators will soon sort the whitefly out.

I think I'll have to lie down now. ;-)

BTW my neck and shoulder are feeling much better today as I didn't do a lot of blogging this weekend which was just what the doctor ordered. I hope/think you guys will understand that my not visiting and commenting doesn't mean that I don't like your blogs anymore, but that I was and still am physically unable to visit and comment as much as I would like to. Pain is not fun.

copyright 2008 Y.E.W. Heuzen