Finally, Back to Normal

January 17, 2010 at 7:41 pm (Cold Weather)
Tags: Cold Weather, Freeze protection, Gardening

“Finally, Back to Normal”, a copyrighted post, was written for my WordPress blog called Always Growing by Jan in Covington, Louisiana

At last the extreme cold weather has moved on, and we have more seasonable temperatures. Our internet connection has been down for several days, so I haven’t been able to post or check out other blogs, so I have a lot of catching up to do.

Finally, the cold weather broke this last Thursday. I think this is the longest cold spell we have had since we moved here in 1976. I know that the temperatures were the lowest in over twenty years. Since I started gardening seriously just after then, many of the things I have planted have never had to take such low temperatures for so many hours.

It looks like everything I covered made it through the ten days of freezing weather though most of the tropical plants look a little shabby. There were a few plants, that I was surprised that made it through even though they were covered, for example, our little mango tree that was started from a seed looks fine even thought it was only covered with plastic.

The plants in the garden are another thing. I feel pretty confident that they will all return from the roots, but, of course, you just never know. The agapanthus and crinums are all wilted; the gingers are all scorched-looking; the cannas, amaryllis, and calla lilies leaves are all lying down on the ground and will have to be cut off. I did mulch just about everything with a tremendous amount of pine needles and was pleasantly surprised to see how many tender perennials had green leaves underneath the mulch. One example is pineapple sage ‘Golden Delicious” that seemed to have survived under the pine needles. I really didn’t think it would. It does look like I have lost the regular pineapple sage which I have had for over ten years in the back garden.

Of course many things didn’t seem affected by the cold at all. The Easter lilies are just fine and are now about four to five inches tall. The evergreen daylilies’ foliage came through the cold with no problem. Some of the sages did, too.

Of course, there are no flowers in the garden right now except for the paperwhites and violas. This is very unusual. When I look at previous January posts, there are so many winter blooms, but not this year. Not having more flowers in the garden certainly makes me look forward to spring coming even more than normal.

This is it, just about the only flower showing right now.