Gardener Reveals One Crucial Task You Should Do At Night to Keep Your Plants Comfortable

Unlike humans, plants are stationary. They can’t walk or hop or eat a pizza, but still, humans and plants are similar in some ways. Yes, just like the ticking internal clock of a gardener tells them it’s time to go to sleep, the cluster of rose bushes in their garden goes through the same process. As dusk sets in, the stems start drooping, leaves dangle loosely like pendants, and flowers close their petals. Zillions of tiny genes embedded in the stems and petals of these plants constantly inform them whether it’s light or dark, whether it’s cold or warm, NASA explains. This opening-closing and falling-lifting are rhythms that plants follow based on the environmental conditions outside.

In a conversation with BBC Radio Somerset, master gardener Claire Greenslade (@claire_greenslade_) suggests gardeners blanket their plants the same way they blanket themselves during nighttime. Greenslade, former head gardener at Hestercombe House near Taunton, Somerset, England, now operates her own garden, sprawling with sprays of narcissus, bouquets of gnomes, gooseberry bushes, and beds of crayon tulips. In this interview with the BBC, Greenslade appears in a lavender-colored shirt, posing alongside a spume of vivid purple delphiniums, as photographed by the garden photographer Fiona Walsh.

With summer around the corner, Tauton’s weather is mostly sunshine with drizzles of light rain for roughly half a month and ample sunshine, per Weather25. At this time of the year, gardeners are usually juggling so many things. Daytime is packed with regular gardening tasks – pruning, shoveling, watering, etc. But it’s the nighttime that most gardeners seem to ignore. While they snuggle inside their cozy blanket, the plants outside are battling with the cold breeze and buffets of precipitation. This wouldn’t be an issue if the gardener had their plants inside a greenhouse, typically covered in glass. However, most gardeners, Greenslade included, don’t have a full-fledged greenhouse. Therefore, they need to find a trick to ensure that their plant babies are comfortable and restful as they sleep.

"I've got two methods – one is that I cover all my seedlings at night in fleece. It will keep it a little warmer for them. When it gets to about 09:00, I uncover them and let the sunlight get to them,” Greenslade told the BBC. Adding to this, the Somerset woman also shared a method which is her “top tip” to protect the plants. The tip, she said, sounds a bit weird, but it has worked for her. The idea is to keep the plants in those plastic containers that can be shoved under the bed during the night. "I've got them out in the garden and at night I pop the lid on and in the morning take the lid off,” she described. "I am covering my seedlings with fleece in the evenings to keep them cosy," she wrote in an Instagram post while sharing some photos of her blanketed plants.

When it comes to hydration, however, Greenslade doesn’t recommend watering the plants during the night. “I'd try not to water at 22:00 or really late – when the temperatures drop, it will stay cold at night,” she explained. Although at this time of the year, between April and May, the plants require more water than ever, this water should be sprinkled mainly while their bodies are still seeped in warm, bright daylight.