Rescuing the Geraniums

Sunday was garden-day, once more. Fortunately we had nice warm-ish weather, and the threatened rain held off; it kept a steady ~58* F most of the day with patchy sun. Not bad to work in at all.

So, I cropped the rest of the tall weeds and uprooted them, leaving a big hay-stack of ex-weeds lying atop one of my beds. I haven't quite finished marking out those plants that I want to protect a little for their winter nap - several members of the herb-garden family, that is.

I moved the rosemary and a surprise tomato plant (still alive? it's a mystery) but nevertheless, I moved it "inside" to the makeshift coldframe.
Very makeshift, as you can see from the photo, but I think I may get away with it, or at least I'm willing to give it a go.

I used a couple spare screen windows that I found in the junk to frame up one wall - filled with all the rocks that my plot seems to propagate so well. I figure, it's thermal mass! I'm also planning on using water-filled jugs as additional solar heat collectors.

So far, however, one of my other rock-walls has harbored a nest of either hornets or ground-wasps - not sure which, and it doesn't matter so much except that of course, they think I'm the enemy. This is problematic, as I have nothing against my striped winged friends, except of course that while they keep my scented geraniums company, they also get upset when I go in the coldframe to tend or add plants. And they sting. We're at an impasse, and I'm hoping that with the onset of colder temperatures, they'll go dormant or something. I have to admit, I've forgotten what they do to overwinter. I don't want to evict them, but I also have no desire to get all kinds of welts from their stingers. Ow. So...one dilemma at a time. Next dilemma is how I should go about filling in the odd-spaces - probably sheet-plastic.


While weeding and moving the rocks around, I also discovered a huge fuzzy black caterpillar, interesting enough to almost make me go find a bug-book to look him (her?) up to see what kind of wings it'll have when it's no longer a caterpillar.