You should invest in a garden Igloo to save money, to create a great place to hang out, and to make more plants! Overwinter your tropicals in style! I want to show you why you need a garden igloo and I’ll talk tips and tricks for optimizing this fun addition to the garden.

My first love was tropicals, and if you're anything like me you would buy them and then watch them die every winter.  After that I switched to bringing them into the house every winter, filling up windowsill and bathrooms, and generally driving my husband insane. Then we found an amazing solution, the garden igloo. I put it up in late fall and take it down in spring.  It's very easy to put together, just like legos .First thing you want to do is to put garden furniture in here or build it around existing furniture like we did.  This is an amazing place to come out to to have cocktails in the rain and for the dogs to hang out during the day to soak up all that heat.  Now to the tropicals

When you bring plants in and out of the Igloo you want to do it on an overcast or foggy day.  When coming in the light passing through the plastic is twice as hot so it can easily burn plants not acclimized. When taking plants out of the igloo you want to do a process called hardening which is just getting them used to strong sun and wind again. You accomplish this by bringing the plants out for one hour on day one, 2 hours on day two, and so forth for a week.  If you live in a mild climate like me you can speed the process up. I usually do 1.5 hours on day one, 3 hours on day 2, 7 hours on day 3 and day 4 they are out.

So the way the igloo works is it raises the ambient temperature by 10 to 15 degrees and protects plants from wind, which amplifies the low temperature even more. It is basically a greenhouse that is a thousand dollars cheaper than one normally this size and portable so you can put it away at the end of the season.  

The types of plants you want to bring in here are ones that would get taken down by frost, think bananas, Caladiums hibiscus and agapanthus.  I personally store my new guinea impatiens, bromeliads and coleus here.

To care for the overwintering plants you want to water from the bottom if they are in a small pot and if they’re in a large pot, make your best effort to not get water on the leaves.  This encourages disease growth and is a good idea with plants in general.

Another great use is for cutting and seed starting.  Instead of bringing in all my Coleus I just snip a branch, make a cutting and stick it into fresh potting soil.  I've been saving my Coleus like that for years and you get a really high success rate.  This also saves you a ton of money because each Coleus costs like $5 at the store, who doesn't love free plants.  As to seeds, the strong light, warmth and humidity make this a great place to start them. You get faster germination, and stronger growth. You can also grow them to a larger stage than you can on a window sill or under lights. I’ve been growing my Spanish flag to a big size so when I plant them they’ll have a much better chance to thrive.

I hope you join me and Nacho on this journey. I'm going to offer a different kind of philosophy towards gardening than you might have seen before. Gardening is battle. It’s not zen, it’s not meditation.  It’s battle against the elements and disease, a battle against soil conditions and pests.

Garden Igloo (paid link) https://amzn.to/43cf9Fh