Containers in the garage (cont'd)

No sooner did I move the containers out of the garage, than the temperature dipped again! Not wanting to drag them back into the garage, I put the containers close together and covered them all with a tarp.

It brought back memories of a local dentist who priveleged me with a tour of his garden many years ago. He had one of the largest collections of Hostats that I had ever seen with many of the hostas in containers.He had so many containers that they never would have fit in his garage, nor mine for that matter. When I asked what he did with his plants in Winter, he told me that he kept them outside. He said that he would put them all on the deck, cover them completely with a tarp, and either nail it down or tie it down so that the tarp would be held tightly over the containers.

He said that over the years, he lost only a couple of containers and plants and that was only once when the tarp had come loose and lifted off the plants. Snow has accumulated in the container, had melted a bit and then frozen causing the pots to crack and the plants to succumb to the elements.

The dentist claimed to have close to 600 different hostas and knowing that my hostas are often sought out by the neighbourhood slug gang, I asked how he protected his plants. Easy he said, I pick them off. 600 different hostas (and this was not counting duplicates) I thought. Pick them off, I thought. Hmmmm, I thought, I do not want to have more than about 50 hostas at the most and I will have to find an alternative to picking them off.