Thank you all very much, fellow cottagers, for your friendly expressions of sympathy and hope for my little plant babies. Although I saw 27 F on the thermometer at 4:00 this morning, my plants didn't freeze last night. Yayyy! The double layer of row cover did the trick. That's the good news. The bad news is that I did two things that in retrospect appear to have been quite stupid. Dumb ThinMan trick number one was turning on the sprinkler at 4:00 am for about a half hour. Can you guess what happened? When I looked out in the daylight I saw that the soaked row cover had flattened most of the plants, in spite of the pipes that I had rigged on cement blocks to support it. Urrrrgggggh. Some of the little guys were just bent and some were snapped. It must have been a horrible ordeal for them, and I'm surprised their screaming didn't wake me up. Still, it looks like a lot of them will make it, or they would have if I hadn't done what I then did. Dumb ThinMan trick number two: Now this may turn out OK, but I have a bad feeling about it. Maybe you can tell me what you think. I had read in a very authoritative source that I should pinch back cosmos to the first node to get branching plants and more flowers for cutting. Now, I think the first node means the first pair of true leaves, so I decided to go ahead and do that with all the cosmos that, after last night, looked like they were waking up from a bad acid trip, not that I would know anything about that. Truly. What makes me think that I messed, up was that some of my plants were actually pretty tall and the stems by the first pair of leaves where I chopped them had got pretty woody, not nice and green like the top, where there is still growth happening. It just hit me this afternoon: those plants are never gonna grow any more at all, are they? I'm a gardening idiot, aren't I? I thought so. Arrrrrrghhhh. Well anyway, thanks for hanging in there for me and reading this to the bitter end. I really appreciate all of your kind thoughts. Note to Diana - yup, I'll be raising and selling sunflowers again this summer, and I'm trying to branch out into some other flowers, as well. You can see how well that's going so far. :-) ThinMan

I went south for New Year's and arrived home late yesterday. After checking the forecast, I was out with a flashlight gathering potted plants from Australia & S Africa that probably wouldn't have survived the 15°overnight temperatures. But my Hostas are loving every minute of the frigid temperatures! There were a lot of evergreen plants that had foliage on the ground this morning, but they will revive when the temperatures moderate. Just sorry about all of the Camellia blooms that will be brown in a day or so.

I also winterize my potted maples, hostas, heucheras, and mint in the attached and unheated garage for the last couple of years. Even with the really cold Chicago weather such as last 2 weeks (high single digit, low minus 10F), temp inside the garage never dropped below 25F. I use an old fashioned thermometer. Your zone is typically warmer than mine. So keeping them in unheated side makes sense. Last year, my potted maples winterized in the unheated attach garage woke up ~ 3 weeks earlier than the ones in ground. The garage temp can easily go above 45F and stay consistently above 45F when outside temp is above 25F (mine is particularly bad due to the south facing garage)

One night we had goodly hard frost . Temps were -4 celcius 24.8 Farenheit . We have also had snow thanks to a storm that blew through up from the USA on November 2nd. It didn't stick around but was depressing to see snow so soon. Not sure why but Houzz wont let me post an image of the snow ??? anyone else experiencing this ? Figured it out . For some reason the image was saved on my computer as a jfif file??? Not sure why or how . However, I had to convert it to a jpg file for Houzz to allow it to upload. Now we are in a heat wave , last day supposed to be tomorrow and then the temps drop dramatically.