You can really play up the drama by timing an outdoor landscape light onto the colorful bark. What a way to warm up your welcome home on a dark winter night.
• Plants with bird-feeding berries: You get a bonus here with color from both the berries and the birds that will visit your garden. Hollies, Oregon grape, pyracanthea and cotoneaster all provide beautiful berries for the birds.
• Plants that look good naked: Trees and shrubs that twist and turn will hold snow and frost on their beautiful limbs and add texture to the winter garden. Beautiful nudes look especially nice when placed in front of a solid wall or dark evergreen background. Look for contorted filberts, Twisty Baby dwarf black locust or Robinia, gracefully weeping wisteria trees and the delicate looking but winter-hardy weeping threadleaf arborvitae.
• Fall is for feasting: Extend the season of your vegetable harvest.
Simply covering your tomatoes, leaf crops and roots crops can extend the harvest for weeks or even into late November.
• Saving the tomatoes: Keep them dry and they’ll turn red. Use tall stakes of rebar to make a cone-shaped tent over tall tomato plants in the ground and drape with plastic. Move potted tomatoes plants under cover. You can also harvest green tomatoes and let them ripen indoors or uproot the entire plant and hang upside-down from the rafters of a garage or garden shed.
• Dirt-cheap cold frames: Use PVC plastic hoops, metal hoops or even hula hoops for support and cover your rows of veggies with bubble wrap, corrugated plastic or use old windows laid atop a stack of cement blocks. Just a small area covered by glass can continue to provide fresh greens and herbs from the garden all winter.
