Container Garden Hacks: Protect Plants from Frost & Wind

Facing a cold snap? There are ways to protect plants from sudden frost, freezing, high winds or heavy rains that can damage and destroy your plants. Use this DIY trash bag to create a small greenhouse hack to instantly save your container garden from the elements. Learn when to cover plants, when to relocate them to a sheltered area, and how to protect your food supply fast.

#containergardening #smallspacegarden

00:00 Chapter One – The Problem
03:00 Chapter Two – How to
09:00 Chapter Three – What to expect

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If you garden, whether it’s a small garden in your yard, on the deck of your condo, or even on the balcony of your apartment, this video is definitely for you. This Urban Sentinel, and let’s get into it. Now, I will preface this by saying if your garden is in the ground, whether it’s direct in the ground or raised beds on the ground, this is going to be less applicable. You can still do some of the things, but it’s less applicable to you. This is for people growing in buckets and and baskets and containers, small pots, planters, what have you. The advantage that you have is if you’re still growing fruits and vegetables and you’re in the fall like it is right now in mid-occtober going in towards the winter, you have the advantage to be able to relocate if possible your crops, your vegetables into different locations depending upon what the weather is. and it is primarily for inclement weather, heavy rainstorms, freezing temperatures. It might only be down into the 30s, but that can kill a lot of sensitive vegetables, especially if they’re in that final stages of their development. So, with these techniques, you’ll be able to hopefully prolong or extend your growing period, not just for that temporary setback of the weather, but during the actual fall going into the winter season as well. Now, just a quick look. These are some of my plants that are kind of coming in. The broccoli, I had a little issue with those, so they’re just now starting to get a little bit better. The spinach has been lackluster. I ended up having to cull uh two of the cucumber that were growing on here. They were over yellowed and there’s some spotting on the leaves still. This guy is kind of hanging on. And I’ve got another one here that’ll still be well. This is actually dill that I’ve seated in with the cucumbers as well. I’ve pretty much let my lettuce just go. I’m not going to worry about that right now. And I’ve still got some beets in the back which aren’t ready to uh harvest yet. They’re they haven’t started to head through the top of the soil. Now, the main thing I wanted to discuss is this. This is my next step. I should have done this the first time when I originally had this garden up. I tried covering it with uh sheets, plastic tarping over everything, and it was a pain in the butt to do. Now I realized, well, I should have done something a little bit simpler. Clear plastic garbage bags. These are the 45 to 50 gallon bags. Um, you get them at Home Depot. I’ll actually put an image up on the screen so that way you can see it. It only cost me 24 bucks basically. And what the primary use is when we do have those temperature drops where it might get down into the low 40s at night or if it’s going to be a relatively cool overcast day with some rain and I don’t want to risk damaging the plants, I’m able to put these over quickly. They basically sleeve right over it and it’s a lot easier to do. So if you’ve got tall plants that are inside cages growing, it’s a lot easier to cover them up and then be able to pull it off later on. So, they came in the box, two rolls of these, and it pretty easy. They actually just they’re not even um attached individually separated. This way, you can open it up, drape it over your plants, and then if you choose to, you can use down here at the bottom, you can either use twine, bungee, or even just a few pieces of uh duct tape just to keep the plastic down. Now, the primary thing that you’re doing that for is when it is going to be cooler to cold, you want to reduce the amount of cold air getting in. You want to be able to trap in the heat inside. But you do have to be careful of humidity. And I know most people tend to think of humidity as being a hot summertime thing. You know, you walk outside, it’s 80° and your eyeballs are sweating. And if snakes had armpits, that’s what it would taste like. But humidity is basically the ratio of the water to temperature in the air. the moisture content. So, it could be 50° outside and then inside here it might be a few degrees warmer. That temperature difference builds up the condensation, but if there’s limited air circulation, you increase the chances for mold and mildew to develop on the plants affecting the plant’s growth and the health of the uh fruits and vegetables that you’re getting from them. Now, of course, when you get a weather forecast that there’s going to be a noraster, which technically we’re in the middle of here in central Connecticut, but we just mostly had strong winds and some rain yesterday, and it’s pretty much mostly cloudy today, but it’s still not too bad. But when you do have those situations and especially as I said before, if you have your plants out on a balcony or on a deck and you don’t have the availability to move them into a an enclosed porch or into a garage or something like that, this could be an option to help keep them covered, keep them safe for a temporary amount of time. Now, this is just single layer plastic, so I could actually, if I needed to, do a double up layer, put it over it, thickens, it thickens the insulated lever, level just a little bit, and that can help as well. But like I said, the primary concern is you want to make sure that you still get a good amount of air circulation in there and only for a temporary period. I I would never leave these out like this through the winter time. They they’re just not going to make it. Luckily, I’ve got a greenhouse. So then the next step would be moving the plants that are still viable, still growing into the greenhouse. Now, I already have some in here. I started these guys from seed about a month or so ago. And so I’m going to have to rearrange and move things about, shift some of this stuff around. But basically, my plan is I still have a few vent uh issues where it’s not quite closing up and I’ve got a couple of gaps around the doorway and on the other side with a few of the loose panels. I seal that up. Keeps control of the temperature. I move some of those other plants like the tomatoes and the potatoes inside so they stay sheltered during the colder period and then I’ll be able to continue to do my growing hopefully through the rest of fall going into winter. Not sure how well some of the vegetables are going to produce, they still tend to follow a certain natural cycle, but with the hopefully increased warmth in here during the daytime that will help extend that growing period long enough so I can harvest a little bit more from them. Now, this is a bucket of sweet potato. I messed up. My original intention and my thought process was inside this basket, it’s a 5gallon bucket. I’ve got one sweet potato in there. I let it basically root and sprout and I got these vines. Now, the next step would have been the vines grow and then I would harvest the flowers coming off of them to replant as slips. Didn’t quite do that. What ended up being is that I should have snipped these when they were maybe a foot long at the most instead of getting to the length that they are. This one is almost 6 ft long. But I can still salvage that because what I’ll do next is I’ll pull the 5gallon out of this out of this laundry basket. Then I’m going to fill the laundry basket with the dead leaf mulch and some soil all the way up to the top. And I’ll have several of these actual vines planted. And what I’ll do is snip off a lot of these smaller leaf ends and just leave four or five towards the top at the very top of the soil. The rest is just going to be stem running all the way down into the bottom. So then having them inside the basket, hopefully given enough time, what I intend to do is actually have these vines in some water, a bucket, jug, what have you, and let the water and the uh vines start to get a small amount of roots growing first off of where the leaf stems are cut. This way, they’ll start to root, place them into the soil, and then from there, I’ll be able to have the actual potatoes start growing. I’ll leave the original sweet potato in the bucket that it’s in and just maintain that as a basically a feeder source for getting new vines from it. So, I’m hoping to be able to perpetuate the growth cycle that way. Then, when it does get too cold, I’ll move this basket into the greenhouse and this way it’ll stay temperature controlled. I can still maintain the watering and caring for it that way. Now, this guy, this is the second generation potato in the basket that I’m working on. The last set of potatoes, something got at it and it destroyed it after about week two. This was the replacement that I put in. And it’s actually, as you can see, two separate uh growing shoots. I’ll add another layer of compost leaf material. Bring it up to just about here. And then same thing again. I’m going to continue to let this grow a little bit more. And then if it’s going to get too cold, then I’ll move it into the greenhouse as well. So then I’ll have sweet potatoes and white potatoes growing in the basket. Like I said, right now it’s about 60° out. Supposed to stay in the low 60s for today going into the next 3 or 4 days. So even with the plastic sheeting, I’ll take that off, let it just get the natural heat that’s out there, and only put it back on when the temperatures are going to really drop to the low 50s. This way I keep it covered. And as far as some of the other vegetables I have, they’re going to go as they go. I had a white powdery mildew with my squash. In fact, I’ll show you that right now. So, this is an example. All of what was left of the squash I had to trim away. So, this is a spaghetti squash here. It’s about four 4 and 1/2 in overall and probably about 2 and 1/2 in around. But as you see, these leaves are actually the better looking leaves that were remaining. I had to clear this whole area out. I’ve got a butternut squash over there. These leaves are doing much better. But again, it’s a lot smaller, so it’s going to need more time. Worst comes to worse, I’ll still leave this support trellis pole on, cover it with the plastic, and perhaps double layer because those buckets that the squash are in, they probably weigh with the soil and whatever water is in there over 50 lbs. So, that’s the other thing you have to take in consideration is whatever your containers are. small container is not going to be so bad. But when you’re working with a 5gallon bucket or bigger and that’s loaded up with soil, mulch, and water, you’re going to be looking at anywhere from 30 to 50 or more pounds. So depending upon where you intend to move it, you may either have to just deal with it being in that spot that it’s in or work out what you can to keep it covered because unless you’ve got a hand dolly or somebody else to help you lift it or shuffle it along, it’s going to be difficult to get those things moved to another location if you have to do it in an emergency. But if you’ve got time to plan, then you can probably work something out to get into a safer location. Now, of course, some suggestions are if you’ve got a garage attached or detached, whatever, you can move that into there. If your garage, like mine, really doesn’t get a lot of sunlight. It gets an ambient sort of light. It only gets about 2 hours of direct sunlight. And if you don’t have windows, you can’t take really good advantage of getting light into that garage to help the plants out. But it is a good place to put them if there’s going to be some severe weather coming. If you’ve got an enclosed porch that you can put them on, that also too because you can arrange the porch to be basically a mini greenhouse. Even an open porch where it’s just roof and rails, it helps limit the amount of environmental like snow, rain, that sort of thing. And even though it may be windy, it helps reduce the amount of wind that is actually moving all around. Worst comes to worse, if you’re in an apartment and you’ve got a small balcony that your plants are on, get some uh just blue tarp or whatever, maybe some cardboard, put the tarp down, cardboard on top, and then put the plants on top of that inside your apartment near the window where the balcony is. This way, you can still water them. Water’s going to, you know, eventually make its way out into the cardboard and then you still have the plastic tarping underneath so it doesn’t ruin your floors, your carpet, and you have any problems like that. So, these are more temporary measures that you can use to adapt and adjust depending upon what you’re growing. Some things will do fine for quite a while without any real difficulty being outside. Other things you may have to kind of gauge it on a plantbyplant basis. So, overall, I’d say a third of my garden I intend to cover and then move into the greenhouse to see how long I can keep it going once the weather starts getting colder. I’m talking like daytime highs are only in in the mid4s to nighttime lows hitting the upper 20s to low 30s. That sort of deal. The rest nature’s just going to do what nature’s is going to do. But also too, the squash as an example, it’s really not worth doing the extra effort for those two plants because I’m not going to get much out of it. I do have a pepper plant that I’ve got covered that I intend to see how that goes. That’s doing a little bit better. And I’m not going to worry about the cucumbers and I’m not going to worry about some of the other plants that I’ve got growing. I can restart those in the spring next time. You know, life lessons learned. But these are some things that you need to think about if you’re doing the small space gardening. You know, you’ve got that all set up and worked on. This is a lot easier because draping those sheets as they were over everything was a pain in the butt and it didn’t do as well because it left too much air inside that didn’t really trap any warmth. It just sort of allowed the cold air to migrate through the whole thing and it wasn’t doing as successful as I had hoped it would. This I feel will work out a lot better individual plants and this way you can kind of regulate the air flow that you need. Raise up the sheets a little bit, maybe not seal them off depending upon the situation of how long they’re going to be covered. So like, share, subscribe, leave a comment, let me know what you think. If you have any other ideas that you might want to try out or share with people in the comment section, please do so. And that’s it for now and I’ll catch you in the next one. Forgot to show you two things. One, this little uh grow experiment here. It’s just water, banana peels, and green beans ripped up, chopped up, put in here. The idea is it’s going to sit for about 2 weeks or so, kind of ferment, and the vegetables are going to release the potassium from the banana peels and the nitrogen from the beans in a moderate amount. But then I’ll be able to strain it and use just the liquid to help fertilize some of the plants to give them those extra uh nutrients that they need. This is the bag, the box of the bags I was talking about. 50 bags, 50 gallons, 3 ft 2 in x 4t 3 in because that’s big enough that when it’s opened up, it’ll cover everything. So the key thing is yes, you’ll see 50 gallon, you’ll see 39 gallon, you’ll see 18 gallon. That means nothing to me when it comes to the dimensional size that it’s going to cover. Now, the key thing is is these need to be clear bags, not white. Clear bags. And you’d find those over in the same areas of like Lowe’s and Home Depot. And Home Depot is actually where I got these, uh, over with all the cleaning supplies, things like that. And you look for the waste paper basket and trash basket bags, and you’ll find them in the different sizes and things like that. So this way if you’re doing small planter pots or things like that, maybe you’re doing a 5gallon bucket, but the plant isn’t that big. You won’t need a 50-gallon bag that’s going to be huge on it, but you could probably use a 15gallon one. That’ll give you enough room to cover it without it pressing down and squishing everything in there. So again, things you need to look for and you can check these out. And then this way if you do have plants outside that you either can’t relocate right away or you’re going to try extending the grow season in a sheltered environment, this would be something to use. Catch you later.