Garden Tip (from “Only the Messenger”): The next couple of days look very dicey. Hopefully you’ve heeded the earlier warning and readied your faucets, disconnected the hoses, brought in your plants, etc. etc. Monday early morning is forecast to be extremely cold (10 to 12 degrees in Collin County, as per Weather just now on my phone). I’d like to speak to my DFW area readers: those temperatures are likely to kill a lot of plant species that we really should never have planted in our area in the first place. I’m the lonely voice out there warning that we need to consider ourselves still to be in Hardiness Zone 7, not the reclassified and warmer Zone 8 that the USDA moved us to a couple of years ago. Be prepared to see some type of damage (even death) to plants like oleanders, gardenias, pittosporums, some palms, waxleaf ligustrums, aspidistra and Confederate star jasmine. Covering them if you can reach over them with an old sheet or frost cloth would help. To everyone else, this cold spell promises to be one of the coldest in the past 25 years. The cast of characters (the winter-sensitive plants) will change with regions, but the suggestions are the same.
Posted on: Thu, 05 Dec 2013 03:44:00 +0000
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