Wednesday morning 1/22/25 - low of 15F, coldest temp. so far this winter.
hard freezes every night since Sunday night 1/19/25.
low this morning was 20F. i’m waiting for daytime temps. to be warm enough to check the plants.
two greenhouses all the way in the back have heaters and plants there are okay. i was scared i would lose power since there’s been multiple power outages since the snow storm.
We had a similar amount of snow but the coldest it’s been so far is 26, don’t expect it to be lower than that for the rest of the winter (it looks/I hope)
We got about 4-5" here. So far keeping water lines unfrozen and getting around to feed up the herd is the biggest pain. The truck keeps getting stuck as the snow has morphed into ice. The girls have loved their first snow experience; but we will be glad to see it go…lol…fixing to break ice on water buckets next…ugh
Reported snow flurries in Plant City, which is just inland from Tampa, last night. Not cold enough to stick anywhere, and I’d be surprised if it even made it to the ground, but its been a crazy winter. No record breaking cold or anything here, just really consistent and wet.
i am so scared for the bananas, they are along the left fence, one is fruiting and the other is flowering, the rest are not but are very cold sensitive kokopos (mid/upper 30s they get damaged). they are all bundled up with several inches thick of blankets and other insulation and tarps as the outermost layer.
i had bananas along the right fence, they were all fruiting (early stages, two the fruit were turned up and the other two the fruit were still facing down) and i chopped them all down a few weeks ago because they were too tall to protect. i was so sad. i used them all for mulch around my other trees. bagging the racks is not enough, they have to be fully covered top to bottom and i simply do not have enough materials for wrapping plus the stems were all over 10 feet so it would have been hazardous as well to keep climbing the ladder to cover and uncover during the entire winter. i had tried just bagging the fruit but they still got cold damage when i didn’t wrap thick enough. the fruits really suffer from temperatures below 45F, depending on the duration. and 40s are the normal lows here in the winter. the fruits start turning black (black spots and blackened ends) in the 30s. january will be over soon, it’s the coldest month.
Thought about you when looking at the modeling down there the past week and seeing the consistent snow threat run after run along the Gulf coast. I remember talking climo, wx instrumentation, and zone pushing with you.
Hopefully most of your plants come out of it alive. The pics have been beautiful down there. It would’ve been a good storm even for us northerners.
yes, i definitely learned a lot from last year’s freeze which was not as cold as this one. also the snow is weird here, i lived a long time in NYC so i’m familiar with snow, this snow is like dry ice, it’s evaporating faster than it’s turning into water. when there’s been this much snow up north and the sun comes out and melts it, there’s usually flooding and pools of water, although there is less asphalt and concrete here, there’s many low areas for water to pool.
Funny in Georgia here {Southeastern} we are getting tons of melting and pooling. Which of course turns to ice in the night!..lol…I’ve about busted my butt many more times today.
i had 3 nights of extended deep freezes, low weds. was 15F, low thurs. was 20F, low this morning was 23F, basically below freezing from sunset to a bit after sunrise. i don’t have ice when and where i expected to see ice. i can hear the water dripping from the roof down my gutters. even on the north side of the house, where there’s been no sun, i don’t have ice. i read it is called sublimation where snow just evaporates into air, i just didn’t think it was warm enough in the daytime to do that.
i just uncovered everything except the bananas. everything is still alive (so far), though the damage ranges from minimal (most plants) to severe (one plant). most just had damage to the topmost and/or outermost leaves and thin branches. considering that all my trees are still very young, that’s not bad. my oldest citrus, the calamansi had the least damage of all the citrus, it was also the least protected of the citrus too. maturity helps. the one with the most damage was a white sapote, the thinner stems have split and the leaves are all crunchy and it will be totally defoliated, but it is still alive, the trunk and thicker stems are still green. i’ll wait a little longer though because i know damage can take time. i hope it comes back in the spring.
The benefit we have in the south during a snow event is our daytime temps don’t stay too brutal. I have no damage on anything besides some potted dragonfruit cuttings, a couple may die but I didn’t want to move them to the greenhouse as I can simply make new cuttings. Funny how hardy some things can be, acerola is not one of them haha
yeah, we almost always stay above freezing during the daytime but on Tuesday we barely stayed above freezing and it was only for a few hours in the late morning.
i learned last year acerola is not hardy at all, kill temp is freezing, damage temps. are mid 30s, i’m not going to try growing that again, the fruit are just weird tasting anyway, i expected a cherry taste and it tastes more like a red bell pepper, and the birds would get to them before they ripened.
fruit trees in the myrtaceae family that all survived in the order of little to no damage to moderate canopy damage are simpson’s stopper (no protection), feijoa (no protection), cherry of the rio grande (two were protected, one was not - the one that wasn’t has been experiencing dieoff for the past year and i don’t know what to do with it), guabiju (protected), pitanga jambo (protected), lemon guava (protected), pitangatuba (had the most protection since it is a zone 10 tree but had the most damage to the canopy, almost half of the canopy).
two of my loquats had tiny fruits so i covered them with frost cloth and tents but it wasn’t enough and i don’t think the fruit made it. thats’ the problem with loquats here, they don’t need protection except when they’re fruiting and they only fruit in the winter. hopefully when they get bigger and some fruit hide inside the canopy, because i only got 1 fruit last year.
white sapote fruits in the winter here as well so i might not be able to grow that here.
also, these coverings have been on from sunday to saturday, so i can’t say for sure what is cold damage versus what is heat damage from being cooked underneath the layers during the daytime. because the two covered loquat have leaf burn but the uncovered one does not. collateral damage is inevitable in these situations.
