O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree, How Useful Are Your Branches

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree, how useful are your branches.

You warm the soil, when snow won't fall,

To save our spring, from no flowers at all.

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree,

We thank you for your branches.

December 12 and not a flake of snow around the house. With temperatures dipping into the single digits this can be a minor cause for alarm. Snow provides a saving blanket of insulation for your plants. What are you to do this late in the season? It's time to be getting ready for Christmas, not traipsing around the frozen garden. As a friend recently lamented, " I know I should do something about these cold nights, but I don't want to do any more gardening!". One of the beauties about having a high mountain landscape is that as challenging as it is, we can guiltlessly forget about it for months on end. Unless...

If you have taken advantage of a longer growing season and planted some zone 4 and maybe even some zone 5 plants, you may need to apply mulch. Try recycling those branches from the tree you picked when your eyes were bigger than your brain and you once again got a tree that was too large. Or, if you actually bought the right size tree and didn't even have to trim the bottom, your local tree lot will have lots of branches lying around.

It isn't really gardening (Ginny), it's just getting out into the sun with some clippers and branches and tossing them where the ground is quite exposed. And actually, I like the idea of some fresh green on the frozen tundra. Branches will stay green until covered with snow, and since the branches are intact, removing them will be easy after the snow melts.

Happy clipping, Happy Holidays, and hopeful for snow.

Fresh shot of green in an otherwise desolate garden bed.