27: Killing Frost

This weekend brings the first killing frost of the season to Chicago. I'm not a farmer, and this is my first full year of outdoor gardening, so it's a concept I wasn't familiar with before. First frost is when temperatures dip just below freezing; it might damage tender leaves and kill more vulnerable vegetables, like tomatoes. Killing frost is more severe; most vegetation doesn't survive. First frost marks the end of the growing season, but killing frost feels like the true start of winter.

We have a concrete-slab patio out back; when we bought the house a year ago, the patio was surrounded by massive clumps of very sad hostas. No flower bed, just hard packed earth and these huge leafy plants with the remains of dead purple flowers hanging off them. Weeds had choked out the grass around the hostas and started to grow into the cracks in the concrete. It was too late to do anything about the backyard by the time we moved in, so I spent all of last winter sketching garden layouts and dreaming about what we could do.

When spring finally came, we divided the hostas into smaller plants and added a flower bed around the patio. Hard dirt became a softer flower bed, with hostas distributed around the patio in a checkerboard pattern, alternating with ferns I'd transplanted from elsewhere in the backyard. Transplanted ferns tend to go into shock, their fronds going limp until they can establish their roots again. By the time the ferns had established themselves and started to stand upright again, I'd made a discovery: the flower bed around the back patio was in full sun for about nine hours a day. This is a problem for hostas, which prefer shade. Mine had gone crispy, their leaves turning brown and curling like old paper. I cut back the damaged leaves as best I could, and decided to move the plants to a shadier spot after the growing season had ended. I bought a quarter pound of native wildflower seed to go around the patio.

The fun part of wildflower seed is that you don't really need to plan a garden (or a prairie patch). You can just weed the area you want flowers, scatter the seed, and under the right conditions, it will grow. The trick is timing. Wildflower seeds need to be scattered in the spring, after the ground has warmed from the last frost, or else they need to be planted in the fall, just after the first killing frost. Too early in the fall, and they'll sprout. Too late, and they'll die.

I scattered about an ounce of wildflower seed about six weeks ago, a day or two after first frost and the same day we moved the hostas. Then I realized my mistake; the killing frost hadn't come yet. That ounce of seed took root, and while it's been gratifying to see sprouts of daisies and coneflowers and cosmos coming up, I've been bracing myself to watch those plants die. When I look out the back window and see those clumps of green gone, I'll know it's time. The rest of the seed will go in the ground then, and with any luck, it will come up next spring.

What I talked about:

Every month at Seeing & Believing, we run a bonus episode so we can talk about a movie we might not have been able to cover on the main show. November's bonus was a Patreon pick; one of our patrons chose Agnes, a horror movie from last year.

For the main episode of Seeing & Believing this week, Kevin and I reviewed The Banshees of Inisherin, and I gave my thoughts about Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. For our Watchlist segment, in which we take turns picking a movie the other host hasn't seen yet, Kevin chose The Rocketeer.

I forgot to include this last week, but on Halloween, I returned to Dave Maher's This Is Your Afterlife podcast for a Patreon bonus episode to talk about John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness.

What I Watched:

I finally started season one of Severance. I am the world's slowest TV watcher—TV always feels like more of a commitment than movies, and I hate binge-watching both in practice and in theory—so I've been hesitant to pick this one up. The hype around it felt so overwhelming that I wasn't sure it could live up to its reputation. Three episodes in, and I'm cautiously ready to say I was wrong: this show rules.

What I'm reading:

Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry, by Michael Glover Smith and Adam Selzer. Before the American film industry was based in Los Angeles, it had epicenters in New York and Chicago; the Chicago histories have been mostly ignored, and Smith and Selzer do their best to remedy that. I also don't know a lot about early or silent film, so the book's informative on multiple fronts.