[gardeners] Arctic chill
ronhay@postoffice.pacbell.net (gardeners@globalgarden.com)
Thu, 31 Jan 2002 07:32:23 -0800
Good morning, friends, from a freezing Van Nuys, literally, freezing.
Three nights in a row, now, we have had temps below 32, and, I suspect
since we are even lower than the weather station in Van Nuys, that we
dipped into the high 20s.
Our citrus, even though bedeckt with hastily installed Christmas lights,
to ward off the bitter cold (for us and our semi/tropical plants), they
look seriously bedraggled.
After we strung the lights on our mandarin, navel and blood orange
trees, we picked Th. remaining mandarins, to keep them from freezing
solid. We hung even left one of those orange trouble lights on all night
to keep the cinnamon tree warm.
The tea tree got pretty well blasted Monday night, when the weather
service did not issue frost warnings for our area. On Tuesday, at about
7:30, Vivian and I got out there in the dark and cocooned the tea and
curry leaf trees and then went on to the citrus and the cinnamon tree in
the back. Boy, was it windy and cold!
Just about everything that was not already dormant "took gas..." even
our Iceland poppies. The leaves on our coral tree (erythrina
corraloides) look like cooked cabbage.
The lower leaves of our artichokes, just about to bud out, look as if
they had been steamed, they are so limp. The callas' leaves look pretty
much done for, too.
Next Saturday, it looks like our green can for yard wastes will be
all-too-full of formerly healthy plants.
There wasn't really much one could do when it snowed in Malibu:(
Ron