Oh, Great
The camellias have just started blooming and we are scheduled for a hard freeze on Wednesday night/Thursday morning with a low around 23°F. The cold won’t kill the bush, but it will ‘burn’ the buds causing the edges of the blooms to be brown. This is a major bummer as the blooms look like very large roses. [I’ll try to remember to take some pictures tomorrow.]
It looks like we will only get one day of below freezing temperatures, but it is always annoying as the older local houses aren’t built for these temperatures.
The National Weather Service won’t issue a Hard Freeze Warning until Wednesday afternoon or evening so people will be trying to protect plants and get pets inside in the dark. I have no idea why they do things this way, but that’s the way it works.
The weather is also disrupting life in Australia as fire fighters are working like crazy to contain as much of the current bushfires as they can before the high temperature/low humidity conditions move into the affected area on the local Wednesday [tomorrow for the US time zones because of the International Date Line].
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Talking about older houses not built for cold weather, I was up in the attic of my duplex trying to get the cable Internet working (final verdict: Some rodent outside the house had chewed through the cable!). There is no — ZERO — insulation up there. No wonder I have trouble keeping it warm in the winter and cool in the summer!
Same here in Sonoma County: Camellias, Daphne and early tulips.
I trust you are planning on covering them?
My wife liberates all bed sheets not on a bed to achieve that sort of goal for her “lantana” (sp?) and Hibiscus.
She also puts out extra helping of wild bird foods and in the morning dutifully breaks the ice of their baths.
Yeow, Badtux, all of the houses in my neighborhood at least have 6-inch fiberglass batts or blown-in cellulose in the attic, even if they have nothing in the walls.
That hurts, Karmanot. I love tulips, but they don’t last down here.
I’ll throw black plastic over the bush, Shirt, and probably put a light underneath, but that rarely works. Don’t tell your wife, but I wrap a chain around lantana and pull it up as I consider it a nuisance weed with really ugly flowers. I can’t get rid of it. They have a huge display of multiple varieties in San Diego’s Balboa Park and they didn’t appreciate my weed comments about it.
“My wife liberates all bed sheets not on a bed …”
ha! I liberated even the sheets on my bed today in preparation for tomorrow’s freeze – i’ll be wrapping up in blankets and quilts (and cats) for the next couple of days.
my camellias went nuts this year, you can hardly see the greenery for all the flowers, but since they’re about as tall as the house I’m not going to be trying to cover them. oh well, there’s always next year.
(and yeah, bees love lantana, and the fluffy black dog loved snacking on it, but it’s an invasive species here, so I yank it out double-quick when I find it in my yard.)
I’m putting up a picture of the poor abused bush. My Mother let the lawn guy ‘trim’ the bush and he managed to reverse what he was told to prune. She wanted it lowered so she could reach the flowers, but he cut into a mushroom shape which it is slowly recovering from.
I have a roll of 10-foot wide construction plastic that I will use.
When we moved into our house, there was a logo on the doorbell that said it was an all electric house…. I think they assumed back in the day that we’d just heat or cool with cheap electricity because there was NOTHING in the attic for insulation and NOTHING in the walls. The windows were the cheapest thinnest glass I’ve encountered in windows. It was effing cold the first few winters until we blew in our own insulation (my husband looked like the abominable snowman when he staggered down from the attic…) Finally had someone come and fill in the walls by punching through the stucco before we had the house painted.
Hope your camellia bush survives. I grew up with one in our yard and love the blossoms.
mine lived through the three days of ice storm last winter without any help and is absolutely covered in flowers this year (although it got some extra fertilizer and watering before this winter got here), so I’m just going to do the same thing this year.
brrr, it’s cold already !!!!!
The apartment I had in San Diego had something called ‘radiant heating’ in the ceiling, which is the worst possible location for a heater. Air conditioning wasn’t an issue except for a couple of days when the Santa Anas blew, but it got chilly and the electricity is not cheap, even before the deregulation rip off. The only thing that was even close to insulation was the ‘popcorn’ on the ceilings, between the radiation heating and the space to be heated.
I hope it can survive on its own, Hipparchia. 🙁 I had a major problem trying to protect it.
I will send it all my best strengthening thoughts.
Only time and warmer weather will tell me the the effect of the weather.