A passive freeze protection of some kind is my plan once my babies go into soil. Ofc you can wrap em, box em up etc. The best thing i have seen is really the big water bins close by to your precious.
Water takes up ahuge amount of energy while heating up and releases it upon cooling and more while freezing. Any chance u get ur hands on big bins and put em under fleece to your biggest tree?
Good luck!
Funny that the GFS has been consistently mild over the last few runs today, but now the Canadian (GEM) and Euro (ECWMF) models are both showing the cold air breaking through to us, when yesterday it was the opposite for all three. Unfortunately, I think the Euro and GEM have a better track record with this kind of thing, and the two of them are in pretty good agreement compared to the very different GFS. These are all for the 14th, showing the Euro, Canadian, and GFS models, respectively:
Good job, hopefully there won’t be any high winds or it might collapse (I build something similar for my satsumas). I am looking forward to see your box next year haha.
Yeah if I put that around mine it would land a few streets away for sure haha always breezy here tho.
I’m already planning to tie it down today! I don’t think it’s at risk of collapse (the braces and bolts are pretty strong, and those panels are more tough than they look), but it could definitely go tumbling.
It’s probably unnecessary because the latest forecast is less cold, but once it was assembled it was easier to just put it over the tree than disassemble, and the forecast could always suddenly shift cold again.
almost like a dome
Just added a temperature sensor to the box, to help me decide whether to add a heat source. It’s a raspberry pi zero in a takeout container with the temperature chip poking out:
It’s tucked into the lower branches of the tree, so it’s likely much warmer up near the top of the box:
This evening is one of those weird ones where it’s been getting warmer rather than colder since sunset, so I’ll have to wait until later to see what the temperature is like in there on a normal night. But at least for the moment it’s warmer in there (“Floater”) than either the outside (other side of yard), or greenhouse:
Your dramatic specimen deserves the very best in tender loving care!
It looks like it will have been unnecessary since the forecast is settling on mid-20s for the coldest night here, which I hope this tree can handle, but if it ends up being colder then I’ll be glad I put all this effort into it.
But as you’ve said if it dies in the 20s it’s still useful feedback. 5 degrees wouldn’t really give you a gauge
That cage would be long gone here haha very gusty and supposed to increase into the night and tomorrow. Hope my greenhouse survives haha at least it’s a warm wind 65*ish
The paracord and 4’ iron spikes as anchors have kept it from budging and it’s been windy here too! These are the maximum wind gusts around here since midnight (mph):
Holding strong:
Latest GFS run is back to absurd levels of cold by the end of the weekend:
The good news is it’s also calling for over a foot of snow first, so everything will have a nice insulating blanket.
Here’s one of the lucky ones (Poncho), which is getting a 100w ceramic heat lamp because it’s my only graft of that variety and I’m hoping it might flower in spring if the buds don’t get damaged this weekend.
It’s probably too small to hold fruit, but at least I’d like to collect pollen. The 100w lamp adds a ton of heat to such a small space, hopefully it’s far enough from the tree to not damage it. I added a sensor under the fleece, and the lamp is keeping it about 16°F above ambient so far this afternoon, will be interesting to see how it does overnight.
I see that you got -5 °C , 24 °F last night. Crossing fingers for the Avocados and good luck with the cold snap.
Hopefully, you will get some good insights on the frost tolerance and find some more superior candidates!
Greets Thomas
And tonight will be even colder! It could get down to 14°F/-10°C. I’ve covered most of the trees with fleece and given a few of them a heat source (such as string lights, a 32w LED grow light, or a 100w ceramic heat lamp), but even still I expect significant losses for the trees without heat under their covers.
You can check the realtime temperatures at this link, and you can click the disabled fields at the top of the chart (e.g., greenhouse, floater 1, etc) to show them. Floater 1 is the large “box” shown above (with a string of incandescent lights), Floater 2 is the “Poncho” tree with a fleece cover and 100w ceramic heat lamp under it. Here’s the chart showing temperatures today since midnight in °C for all four stations:
It’s going to be brutal. I covered most of my loquats and used lights but several are still unprotected. I expect to lose most/all fruit.
I hope you don’t lose all of the fruit @ramv! But yes, this is the kind of freeze that I was hoping we wouldn’t get in an El Niño winter. Oh well!
