Wouldncha know it? We haven’t had a hard frost in years. But now that I’ve stuck all those plants in the ground, temps are supposed to drop into the high twenties. Wunderground says 27° tonight, 32° tomorrow, 30° Sunday, 30° Monday, 34° Tuesday. Weather Channel says 27°, 23°, 23°, and 28°.
Naturally.
That means four dead bougainvillea, four dead lantana, two dead yellowbells (really dead, as in pull them out), one dead blue plumbago, and almost certainly all those little plants I put in the new flower beds: dead dead dead.
Also dead as in have to replace them: all the salvia, the surviving basil, a fair amount of the little ornamentals around the back porch. {sigh}
The yellowbells won’t make it through a hard frost at all. I moved the potted hibiscus out from under the deck roof on the side, where it never thrived, to the front courtyard, where it could get a little more light and water. It’s heavy and has to be hauled around on a dolly. So if it’s still alive now (last night I think the thermometer didn’t drop much below 40), I’ll have to wrestle that thing into the house.
The potted ficus tree will have to be untied from its mooring (it’s roped to a patio roof upright so it won’t blow over in a stiff wind) and dragged further under the roof. Before I replaced the last of the old 1971 windows, I could protect the ficus by pushing it up against the back window, which leaked enough heat to keep it from freezing. No more of that!
The Perils of Pauline phenomenon persists. Finally got rid of most of the six-month-long back pain by sleeping on a heating pad for a couple of nights (don’t try that at home, folks!). Next? TMJ flared up yesterday! I can barely close my mouth and I’ve gone deaf in one ear. Is this shit ever gonna stop?
Interestingly, the muscle relaxant the Mayo doc prescribed, the one I refused to take for the back pain because it supposedly can cause hallucinations in old bats, is sometimes prescribed for TMJ pain. I suppose it’s just another form of muscle spasm…so…why not? I’m going to try it today and hope I don’t fall in the drink running away from little blue men.
It may be possible to protect the plants from frost. First, if any of these plants are located near the house, there may be just enough radiant heat to protect them.
You could also try a couple of tricks to protect the ones that farther from the house or so tender they have absolutely zero frost resistance. The easiest is to cover them with sheets. Sure, it means more laundry, but it often works up here in the north when we get frost advisories and have already planted our peppers, tomatoes, etc.
Another trick to protect plants is to spray them with water; apparently having water on the surface of the leaves makes the tissues less likely to freeze. (I’m not sure I can explain the science behind it.) Since you have to pay so much for water this is probably something you’d only want to try as a last resort, but it’s a trick used in the commercial orange groves in places like Florida that have a freak frost every few years.
Don’t give up hope!
Well, scratch the idea about the water. I should have looked it up first before posting; the spray of water has to be continuous. But, there was another suggestion found in this great publication from University of Arizona: Christmas lights! Yeah, you can drape strings of Christmas lights around the larger plants to generate enough heat to protect them during the night. It also notes that watering the ground really well first helps to maintain heat.
The publication is about citrus trees, but should apply to any cold sensitive plant: http://ag.arizona.edu/pubs/crops/az1222.pdf
Good luck!
Yeah, I knew that about the water. Don’t think I could afford to run the water all night for three or four nights, even if that were practical.
In the past I have put up Christmas lights. The lime tree, which is the only citrus in the back vulnerable to frost, is now WAY to big to drape with lights. And last year it took six months of nagging to get Gerardo to take the darn things down! By which time they were pretty well done in.
I’ll put a couple of shop lights in branches I can reach, but that’ll be about the best I can do. Unfortunately, though, covering it is out of the quesetion. Probably the top of the canopy will freeze back.
We used to safety pin sheets together and put lanterns underneath them after the lemon tree was swaddled. sometimes the very tips would frost, but not nearly as bad as it would have otherwise.
I can confirm Linda’s water theory – the big citrus growers do it out here, and it seems to work for them, but they also regularly top their trees to keep them nice and low to the ground, so it’s a different kind of beast.
Check these out:
http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-203082161/h_d2/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10053&langId=-1&keyword=halogen+light&storeId=10051#.UPC1K4njmI1
They throw off a good bit of heat… if your plants are in one general area, would shining it on them or putting it under a sheet raise the temp enough to prevent frost?
I would never guessed it got that cold by you…especially reading those summer death-heat posts lol
@ Evan: 😀 It’s bizarre, isn’t it?
It can get fairly crisp here, tho I’ve never seen it drop below about 26 or 28 in the low desert. The high plateaus can get quite cold and also see snowfall. And back when we had actual winters, the mountains here used to get a lot of snow. There’s a little burg in the White Mountains, called Hawley Lake, that registers as the coldest place in the country every now & again.
Welp, though our forests are dying and burning down, though it’s hotter than a frying pan here in the summer, though our legislature is so infested with fruit-bugs that it’s affectionately known as The Kookocracy, ya can’t shovel heat! We don’t get noticeable earthquakes (though we could, in theory); we don’t get true tornadoes (yet); and we’re unlikely to be inundated by the sea anytime soon. Life is good. Relatively.