Possibility of frost

Just above freezing in the garden at the moment (1:30 am) and 8.5 deg C in my garage where I've tucked a few plants I don't want frosted.

 

Went down to minus 0.3 in my garden. It was very calm with clear skies in the early hours.

 

Had frost here quite a few things blackened in the garden gunnera,Davidia,dicentra,actinitda so far

 

The external plant area at my local Homebase this morning was absolutely cram packed with tender plants that most people sensible gardeners wont buy in freezing weather, and it's so stuffed with them that lots aren't being watered properly and are collapsing.

 

Perhaps they huddled together for warmth.

 

It's what I've been doing with plants in a polytunnel of evening, putting larger pots into stacks of supermarket crates and covering with 3 layers of old curtains and small plants into stacks of blue mushroom boxes and covering with a few old sheets.

But, unlike some garden centres, I unstack them every morning so they all get loads of light during the day and I water them.

 

Luckily my dad earthed my spuds up on the plot over the weekend. Went up to check this morning, all is well few leaves poking through so covered them over.

In the garden a hydrangea has got frosted, possibly lost my (very few) pears for this year and 2 of my cannas I stupidly planted out beginning of last week might have croaked it..

 

Minus 0.2 deg C in the garden this morning. The airflow was supposed to be changing from North to from SE overnight tonight, but that now seems to have been delayed until tomorrow evening.

I think I'll take a walk to the plot tunnels later on and put some fleece over the more tender stuff like Tagetes and Statice.

Wouldn't be surprised to see another frost in the morning, we've been getting colder weather than's been forecast for Aviemore, Scotland recently.

 

Bleeding heart had some damage done to it. Flowering stems have flopped over :(

 

Covered my newly planted, (last spring) grape vine which had 2 inch shoots, also a couple of Crape myrtle plants.
I used fleece bags on the crape myrtles but they were not quite big enough, so some of the bottom shoots were not covered.
Strange thing, the covered parts are damaged, the parts let uncovered are fine, the grape vine looks pretty bad even though it had heavy fleece on it.

I'll stick to wool blankets in future, which is my usual winter covering.