Getting Our Yard Ready for Winter

We had our first frost in Dallas a few days ago, and since it was right on average for a target date, I guess I have no reason to be surprised. But it still was kind of jarring to wake up to such a cold morning! It didn’t get above 45 degrees this weekend. The first thing I did was to move my herb garden indoors to keep them from getting frost bite.

Luckily we already had a few projects in the works, and with a few days off for Thanksgiving, we started getting our yard ready for winter. I built hoop “green” houses for a few of my garden beds, using greenhouse plastic. I left a few of them open, because these are the ones I will be fertilizing first for spring planting. Crop rotation is a wonderful thing, if you have the space!

We already have a few winter veggies in the ground. These guys probably don’t even need the greenhouse plastic– they love the frost and cold, but we’ll see.

Shockingly, a few of my tomato and squash plants are still alive! A few leaves here and there have some frostbite from the other night, but they are still producing dozens of tomatoes, so maybe we can keep them alive a little longer 😉

We also harvested quite a few squash!

Here is the last of the winter crop to go in the ground. We’ve been growing these seedlings for weeks– it’s nice to finally be able to plant them!

One of our final winterizing projects was to re-roof the chicken coop with tar paper underneath the corrugated roofing, you can visit this page and learn different ways to finish the project. With all the rain we get, we figured this would be a good investment. Roofing contractors Palm Beach county proved to be a very reliable roofing company. Now, we just have to repaint the whole thing to match our house! The roofing of the chicken pen veered our attention to the roof we were living under. Water had dampened a corner of the roof. Commercial roof repair St. Louis professionals immediately arrived and did the check, then mended the roof, to which I was very grateful for.

As you can see, Gregory is very bonded to his “chickies”. He even has little nicknames for them in addition to their actual names. Sometimes he’ll say, “Oh, there goes my naughty one!”