Which direction does your house face? If the sun comes from the right (in your photo) you could plant a shading shrub to the right of the porch. There is something about the symmetry of your home that suggests a seating area, or birdbath or waterfeature would look charming on the left side under the small tree. The right side with the drop off would be perfectly OK left as is and not look off balance. Or you could plant the right side with small airy light trees like japanese maples to provide some wind break. Heavier plantings on the right will give your home a more confined look. That isnt bad if you want it to look solid and substantial. Redbuds would be pretty on the far right in the drop off, but you will be watering them for years to keep them alive in the sun until they establish. It would be nice to get some color near the porch. I like the idea of something tall in the pots - like ornamental grass, and something low and colorful near the pots. Perhaps small colorful collection of pots on the front edge of the porch filled with trailing colorful annuals or geraniums, which of course you will be watering every day in summer to keep alive. A windbreak solution I am considering for my back porch is to put a trellis, or woven screen on each side of the porch. They could be supported by a simple arbor frame of a vertical post on the right and left front corners of the porch, a cross piece on top connecting them like an arbor, and some simple framing going from the front, to the wall of the house to support them. A roof isnt needed, but abviously makes the whole thing easier to put up. You wouldnt change the front appearance of the house much, but you would have an enclosed feeling when standing on the porch. White painted wood framing with white wood trellis or black wrought iron trellis would be compatible with your home. Your house is really nice. The good thing about sun are the brilliant flowers you can show off, once you get the whole thing set up right. Shade just doesnt produce the cheerful colors like sun.

Thank you! In that case, I will care for it as long as possible inside and then offer it to a friend. To be honest, I was hoping it would be possible to have a sort of "living wall" using the grapevine. My room faces the sunrise, so the plant would receive light in the morning, and artificial light once the morning light becomes weak. Any specific reasons why you don't think it would survive indoors?

Kim, I don't know which of Eliot Coleman's books you have. If you have "The Winter Harvest Handbook", you might note his comments in Chapter 4 about his yearly schedule and Chapter 5 about sunlight, where he discusses the variables involved and how they affect how long it takes them to go from seed to harvest in his location. For us, it is even easier, but how long it takes any given crop to mature will vary a great deal depending on when you sowed the seed, how much sunlight and warmish weather it grew in before the weather cooled down, how much sunlight the growing area gets, etc. He also discuss the latitude and longitude of various locations and their effect on when (calendar-wise) the daylength gets short enough to impede plant growth. I found that was one of my favorite parts of the book because it made me think about how stuff grows in other parts of the country and the world. My experiences with fall plants are similar to Flis', which makes sense as we garden at opposite north-south ends of the same county. I like to get most things planted for the winter garden in September, although some years I've gotten away with planting in October or even in November (in the year we didn't have our first freeze until mid-December). I generally don't plant spinach until October as it is fairly cold hardy and grows quickly. I think that daylength (the number of hours of sunlight in a given day) influences plant growth even more than cold temperatures, so usually you will get good plant growth until the daylength starts getting really short in December. Once the daylength gets short and the nights get really cold, the plants can go into a sort of holding pattern when they just sit there and don't make much, if any, new growth. This is something Eliot Coleman discusses in The Winter Harvest Handbook too----for his location, I believe a daylength of 10 hours is the benchmark where new plant growth stops occurring and the plants stay in a holding pattern. You still can harvest and eat them though. That's one reason his book is called The Winter HARVEST Handbook----a lot of his planting is done prior to the true onset of winter and by the time they officially are in winter, all he is doing is harvesting from those plants, not getting more growth from them. If you have his "Four Season Harvest" book, I don't remember what he said in it. It has been a long time since I read that one. I normally use Agribon-19 for in-ground plants in the winter, but will put either DeWitt Ultimate Frost Blanket on top of the Agribon-19 if really cold weather threatens or will throw moving blankets over the hoops that support the Agribon. Both the frost blanket and moving blankets are very heavy and I don't use them a lot. They Ultimate Frost Blanket really blocks out the light, so it is more of a nighttime cover for me. I have found it harder to successfully garden under 4 to 6 mm plastic suspended over hoops. Those sort of low tunnels covered with heavy plastic are terrific if it is a cloudy snowy or sleety day, but on a bright, sunny winter day, you can get an incredible amount of heat buildup in winter in just a short time. My greenhouse is a high tunnel and it has 50% aluminet shade cloth on it year-round. If I fail to go outside first thing in the morning on a sunny winter day and open it up, the temperature inside of it can hit 145 degrees in an hour or so of daylight. That is in a a high tunnel with 4 vents, 2 doors and shadecloth. Can you imagine how much heat would build up underneath clear plastic on a sunny winter day? I've never stuck a thermometer inside a low, plastic tunnel to see how warm or cold it gets, but I know from experience that row covers of all kinds (I now have 4 different weights, and each supplies a different degree of cold protection and each allows a different percentage of light to reach the plants) work better for me than plastic does. I like using a layer of plastic on really cold nights. I will put it over the row cover tunnel around noon so it can soak up heat and sunlight and get nice and warm, but I remove it the next morning as early as possible. Remember the famed greenhouse effect will occur with low tunnels covered in plastic. That doesn't mean you cannot use them, but rather than you just need to watch them carefully or you can fry your plants (or bake or broil or roast them) on a sunny winter day. The smaller a tunnel is, whether high or low, the more quickly it both heats up and cools down. I normally don't use buckets or jugs of water as a solar heat collector with cool-season plants. I save those for the spring-planted tomato and pepper plants that need help to get through the occasional very cold nights that occur after they are transplanted into the bed. Since you're further north than I am, you might need plastic,\ and you might need solar heat collectors in the coldest part of the winter and if y'all stay cloudy a lot in winter, maybe the low tunnel wouldn't overheat on bright, sunny days. For me, though, the plastic stuff heats up so much and I am not always at home to uncover it. Even when I think I am going to be at home all day, all it takes is for the fire pager to go off and I leave the house and I might be gone for 30 minutes or for 10 hours. That makes using plastic really risky for me since I may not be at home to remove it at the right time. I haven't planted anything for fall because my summer garden is still in almost full production. The okra and muskmelons are done, but we're still getting everything else, including watermelons. I do think I might have harvested the last 2 watermelons last week though because the ones that are left are only about the size of a golf ball and likely won't get large enough to mature before the first fall freeze. I worried and fretted that between the grasshoppers, the persistent heat and the drought, a fall garden wouldn't work for me. It also would have meant I'd have to sacrifice summer plants that still were producing like crazy. So, I skipped planting anything for fall, which probably was smart in this instance. We still are getting oodles of peppers, tomatoes, winter squash, southern peas, roselles (tons and tons of them...it is shocking how many there are) and.....I haven't even started digging sweet potatoes yet. I also see a good crop of native persimmons on the trees, but don't harvest them until after the first frost has rendered them edible. After the first freeze has occurred, I am sure I"ll wish I'd planted a winter garden, but by then I'll be all wrapped up in holiday preparations and will say "just as well I don't have a garden to take care of". lol I still have time to sow lettuce and other greens if I want for fall. I do have some perennial onions and herbs that we can harvest and use all winter. With drought the last few years, I've been so tired of it all that I haven't tended to plant much for fall and winter because I want a break. I always have the option of growing greens and radishes indoor on my light shelves in winter if I get in the mood to grow something. Some years I overwinter a lot of stuff in the greenhouse, which is unheated. It gets really warm during the day even with the doors and vents open, and cools off a lot at night, but with water-filled molasses feed tubs and cat litter buckets that serve as solar collectors, it usually stays a good 10-14 degrees warmer at night than the outdoors. However, I have to choose to grow either warm season stuff in there in the winter or cool season stuff, and then manipulate the temperatures in the greenhouse accordingly. If I keep it hot enough during the day to keep tomatoes and peppers happy, the lettuce gets too hot and bolts. Regarding how slowly some edible crops grow during the worst of the winter months, it varies wildly from year to year depending on how many sunny days we have versus cloudy days. You'll have to experiment to see what you get. My plants in the ground grow pretty well until December and then don't get much larger, but beets and carrots seem to do just fine on lower light. Maybe it is because their edible part is below ground. Dawn

Mjlb, not worried too much about fading. The room is pretty shaded - probably gets more light and sun in the winter without the leaves on the trees. I am thinking about white covers for summer and red for winter, but also thinking of just doing one set (time constraints) - and then changing out pillows and accessories. Catt, I love that pillow you linked to --- kind of what I had in mind to bring down some of the white from the window and door frames - and agree about the rug. The one I have there now just blends in with the floor. I also think it needs to be larger. I have tried other furniture arrangements over the years and will do so again, but the one there now seems to work the best.