I like your style. And your passion. Facebook’s loss is our gain. I won’t say nice for***, I will say you have a lovely yard. Crossing my fingers for warmer nights and no frost.
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Thank you!! Tonight will be 28. Tomorrow will be 30. This weekend will be 29 both nights. After this weekend I’ll have a good idea of who stays and goes in the yard. But if everything flourishes through multiple freezes, I guess I’ll have to handle that too. The last frost date on calendar for my city is April 6. But the frost hit here all through April when the weather channel says 34
ive been at it 8yrs now and still are adding and removing things.
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Low of 22 tonight and very breezy. Everything opened is toast Below freezing at least five days in the next week. My peaches are at first pink, apricot finished blooming as did sauzee swirl early peach. A few apples at green bud.
I was going to prepare for dips into freezing but not constant temps below freezing. Deja vu.
I really enjoyed seeing your video!!! I’m right there with you regarding the late freezes. 
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Well my forecast just changed. Now there are nights getting down to 25 this weekend.
What types of banana? As long as the corms survive (seems likely for the duration and depth of cold in this event?), they’ll recover eventually, though starting over the clock for flowering if they need to send up new p-stems of course.
I thought the same exact thing. My dog even tramples mine to oblivion in the winter. It still grows back 6feet tall every summer.
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The bananas overwintered themselves. I know they’re going to survive. They died off in October and got down to 8 degrees. They started popping back up a few weeks ago.
I don’t know what variety they are because I got them at a flea market. But they were growing at the flea market in poor soil, with small green bananas. I just became curious how far I could push them with good soil.
They were planted last summer. This will be the first time they get a full growing season
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After last winter, only one of my four banana seedlings grew back (“Helen’s hybrid,” with two Musa thomsonii and one balbisiana dying). That was after a winter low of 16°F during one entire week where the high never went above freezing.
I assume @Djherndon is talking about dessert (seedless) types, though? I don’t have experience with the threshold for those corms surviving.
If the new pups are killed, that might stress the corm enough to truly kill it. I hope not!
Yes they are the seedless as far as I know.
I grew the golden African, grand nain, cavendish and dwarf cavendish. All of those eventually died out completely
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Just planted another pawpaw, a loring peach and a red haven peach.
The bare roots are all still completely dormant. And they came from a climate zone one warmer than mine.
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Mine outside is just the cold hardy inedible Musa 'Basjoo. I have had it 7 years. Usually I let 4-5 stems grow out. I usually have to cull another 5-6 pups. More like selectively reduce. I usually pot and gift them. That was how I got mine.
My blue Java I pull in every winter. Plan is to do the greenhouse exactly like you did. I believe it is Musa acuminata × balbisiana. But I lost the tag. The crows always steal my tags and drop them on my deck. It is a game to them.
This is how it looks after she tramples it all winter.
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If you have some fruits that you’d really like to protect from the freeze, we’ve had luck with heat lamps. We also tried Christmas lights (the old ones, not LED’s), but they didn’t work. However the heat lamps did, under a moving blanket that we threw over the top of the tree. Won’t save all your fruit, obviously, but you can protect at least a couple branches’ worth.
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I don’t want to protect them. I’m thinking long term right now. This means I’d rather just replace the trees with some that are less likely to bloom this early.
I know bloom time can change for many reasons. Maybe it’s because the earth is speeding up. Maybe it’s as simple as soil chemicals. Maybe light. Maybe warmth. Maybe the photoreceptors.
Whatever makes trees bloom early, it sucks. And I don’t want to worry about protecting fruit trees anymore.
So I am leaving them all unprotected and sacrificing them all for data. I want to see for myself what the temperatures do to these trees. And I will log it with precision, with a side tab noting my emotions as well. This way I can look back on my journals every time I get concerned.
So I’m not protecting anything. I’ve actually started putting in the replacement plants yesterday.
So this is just my observation I will share with everyone. And some of the vets here probably already know the outcome and are tired of explaining it to newcomers Like me over and over
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One thing to keep in mind, is bloom time can be off the first season a new tree is grafted or planted, especially if it was grown in a nursery in a different area. Might take a couple years to adjust to your climate. So it’s possible a new addition will bloom earlier in the first year, but later in future years. So don’t make culling decisions based on first-season bloom times!
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We are down near 20 for three nights. Scary stuff
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Maybe all of the above. I have kept a pretty detailed journal for about 6 years now, some notes and drawings much longer. Bloom time, diseases, pests, harvest, reflections, drawings, photographs. My observation is that I have little prediction over much of anything.
Some years warmer, some colder, some fluctuate, some sustained. One year I get no peaches but tons of Asian pears. One year so many peaches I can’t process them but not a single Asian pear One year we have late freezes in April and May and I get more apples than ever. One year I get nothing–and I mean nothing. One year my hardy late blooming peaches get fried while the early ones that bloomed through the freezes have more fruit. I’ve learned two things for sure. First, i probably won’t ever get plums or apricots. Secondly, strike the first one. I don’t know anything for sure.
If you find a pattern my hats off to you. I study my notes intently like a junior cramming for a physics exam. Sadly, my final grade is nothing to brag about. Just enough to move me along to the next year.
But still I’m there with you, drawing those trees in my sketchbook, making notes, filling out calendars, pouring over the details for some revelation. This time one thing is different. I have an enormous white Russian I’m drinking through a giant straw while I look out the window at those poor frozen fruit trees.
Heck, there’s always next year.
BTW I read my post and it’s pretty cynical. For that I apologize. Honed over many years of discontent, but I still come back swinging. Don’t give up on me.
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Soooper job at detailing your experiences. (Ever think about authoring a novel or a garden book?)
Anyhoooo…once upon a time…I kept a log from about 1985 through 1996 on my bee hives. And part of the frequent entries included dates of blooms, dates of freezes, blossoms that the bees found exciting on any specific day, pollen, relation to raising young bees, honey crop…etc, etc. It told me things like some years the freezes get everything (including most of the good honey sources), and some years you get lucky and rejoice in your harvests.
It also proved climate has perpetually changed…nothing recent about it.
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