After several year's of relatively mild winters, the dark side of mother surfaced again this month.  In January we had a hard freeze that brought temperatures down to the mid 20's for a couple of days.  Now, just a few weeks later we are back in Mother Nature's deep freeze.  All I can say is that I hate cold weather!!!!!!!!   I know this is going to be a major setback to my hybridizing program.  My motto in times of crisis has always been, "deal with it and move on", and that's what I will ...

Today I was able to assess the actual damage my plants incurred from our holiday freeze. My brugmansia are all sprouting new growth and in many cases, buds are beginning to form as well.  Out of the 1500 brug seedlings I have, I think I only lost one.  Almost all of my in-ground brugmansia survived too.  I had at least 75 individual  plants planted in the ground and every single one of them survived. Most just had damage to the tender growth, but a couple of the younger ones were beat up ...

Now that both myself and my plants have thawed out, I can assess the freeze damage.  It is not a pretty sight around here as you can see by looking at this picture of one of my larger angel trumpets, brugmansia Coral Glow.    Fortunately it did not get nearly as cold as many forecasters had predicted.  The low temperature hovered around 29 for a couple of hours and briefly dropped to 28.  That is much better than the 24-26 that was forecast to be the low.Over the weekend I was able to assess ...

Here we go, the temperature just dropped down to 32f and it is only 10:00pm.  I was hoping tonight's weather forecast would be wrong, as they often are, but this one is one is dead on.  Accuweather did not have the temperature dropping below freezing till 5:00am, but Weather Underground was predicting 30 at 10:00pm.  This is not good, we could have 8 hours below freezing!   Now it's 31.4, yikes!!!!  Accuweather is forecasting a low of 28 by dawn, while Weather Underground predicts ...

It looks like D-day is just around the corner.  The dreaded day I'm referring to is our first night with frost and potentially freezing weather.  I was hoping we could slide through the winter without either, but the odds of that happening are not looking good right now.  Here's what Accuweather has to say - "Clear with the temperature approaching the record low of 28 set in 1979; watch for a hard freeze".  Oh joy, guess I know how I'll be spending the new year, covering plants with frost ...