That One Time Everything Iced

Ugh. This winter y’all. This winter is becoming unbearable. I don’t even know what zone I’m in anymore. Is this really gardening zone 9a? Sure hasn’t looked or felt like it. I’ve read a couple of articles about how the jet stream has been situated the last several winters to create harsher winters in the east and mild winters in the west and how it may be tied to global warming but no one is quite sure yet. Despite all of that, I think after the last several winters we may need to re-evaluate replanting certain plants like citrus. And only time will tell if the other tropical plants in the side yard garden or in the other areas of the garden will come back. After last year’s deep freeze it took the brugmansias until late April to start coming up. This year? Who knows.

With it getting down to about 16* last night there will definitely be a set back for a lot of plants around here. So, with that, let’s take it back to Monday when I took some photos of the garden before the freeze and ice and then I’ll share what I took yesterday while it was sleeting. It sleeted hard on and off all day. Definitely not as magical as the snow last month!

The edible garden is really starting to come into its full winter game. A few things seem to have grown slower than usual due to our colder winter but I suppose that is also good because we will hopefully have less early bolting.

Red giant mustard

Lush lettuce and lettuce mix

The spinach was starting to take off as well—we haven’t had great success with spinach in the past because our winters have been warmer but this year seems to have been a spinach year for us!

Happy parsley! I almost over summered my parsley last year only for Harvey to take it out with flooding. Crossing my fingers that the freeze didn’t take it out this year so I can try once again to over summer my parsley!

The kohlrabi hasn’t started bulbing yet but the leaves are finally filling out more.

Fat and happy bok choy. This will be mush when it warms up.

Florida broadleaf mustard

The lettuce was really tasty—I had just started making salads and using a lot of the greens in my lunches.

Still looking drab in the flower garden. I’m glad I haven’t done any garden cleanup yet and I’m going to attempt to not do anything until mid-February and then look at the 10 day forecast and see what the rest of February has in store in case we have another bad freeze.

Our office was closed yesterday (and is closed today, too) so we were home yesterday. Chris had gotten up early to work in his man cave on some doors for his aquarium and had planned on wrapping a couple of the outside faucets when he was done. The high for the day was somewhere early that morning and the temperature was expected to just keep dropping all day. Forest and I got up and I made coffee and things were running fine until late morning when Chris noticed the water pressure was poor, eventually fading to nothing. Now we were faced with the possibility our pipes were freezing and he scurried outside to trace the problem. After almost an hour he finally found the problem—the switch at the well pump had frozen. He defrosted that and wrapped it and we had water again but he did have to go around defrosting some of the faucets outside before he wrapped those. And that’s the same fate this morning, the switch froze again over night despite being wrapped and some of the faucets froze despite being wrapped. And the drain pipe to our washing machine froze and we ended up with water in the laundry room when Chris tried to run the water in the washing machine to keep it open this morning. We aren’t used to this. I don’t like it!

As it was sleeting yesterday I made trips outside mid-morning to cover up the citrus and some of our edibles in the garden. It had rained overnight and we didn’t want to put sheets out the night before only to have wet sheets that then froze so we thought waiting until morning would work. I’m afraid it might have been too late because the citrus were looking rough and most of the edibles were frozen solid. I covered things anyway, hoping for the best.

One of the citrus ghosts!