Saturday, February 18, 2012

Late GBBD February 2012



Sorry yet again for being late with my Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day but we have been up to our necks in snow. We took refuge in Rome, only for it to snow there too ... first time in more than 50 years. We couldn't return for more than two weeks because not only was there a couple of feet of snow across the district but it had formed really deep drifts in the smaller roads and our house was unreachable. Anyway we got back today as the thaw is starting.


We were very worried that the freezing temperatures might kill the olive trees, as happened in 1985, with minus 11 degrees C on some nights and not rising above freezing for several days in a row. I managed to wrap up the trunk of the ancient olive tree that we had moved to the end of the pond - it is vulnerable being in a different aspect from the one it had for the first 300 or so years of its life. So it now has a blue trunk with fleece wrapping around a thick layer of sacking. I can't do that for all 200 olives in the grove. But it seems that the snow has acted like a blanket and insulated a lot of the plants - but we will only really know once it has all melted. The main damage has been the weight of snow breaking the branches of olive trees and umbrella pines.


The countryside does look very pretty with the snow and Lake Trasimeno is frozen over, which is also almost unknown. So I cannot expect there to be much in the way of colour inthe garden but peeping out of the snow is a stalwart cauliflower.



Stay warm everyone, spring cannot be far away.

Y

1 comment:

Diana Studer said...

Hope that all your olives will come thru the winter, a little battered, but basically unscathed!