Recently in Weather Category

Mother Nature put on quite a show last night with a full moon rising amongst our afternoon thunderstorms and a setting sun.

I scrambled to find a blooming Angel Trumpet plant to use in the foreground, but I had to settle for this rather lanky Brugmansia without any blooms.

If you are a weather fanatic like I am, Central Florida is a great place to live.  During the summer the sky comes alive almost every afternoon when the Gulf and Atlantic Ocean sea breezes collide. Saturday's skyline was quite dramatic.

While I was hoping we would get some rain out of these storms, the storm ended-up being all show and no action.  The exploding clouds were a good backdrop to showcase Brugmansia Sweet Summertime, a Monika Gottschalk introduction that thrives in our Florida heat.

Winter rolled in early this year in Florida.  Typically we may have a slight chance of frost in December, but if we are going to encounter sub-freezing weather, it usually comes in January or early February.  This week we are in the midst of a hard freeze.  Last night the temps here dropped down to 25f.  As I am typing this at 2:00am Wednesday morning it is already 26f in my brugmansia growing area.  I'm sure it will drop 3-4 degrees more before sunrise. 

To protect my plants from this sub freezing weather I opted to cover as many plants as possible with commercial grade frost, cloth followed by a layer of clear poly.  Pictured below is one of the larger groups of brugs I covered.  This area measures 35ft x 75ft and contains many of my 7 gallon stock plants inter-spaced with lots of 3 gallon pots of my watched seedlings and the majority of my hibiscus collection.

The irony of this early freeze is that I plan to build a hoop house and shade structure to protect my plants during the holidays.  To get ready for winter I was also planning on culling seedlings, something I had unfortunately put off for the past montht. My Angel Trumpets were just getting ready to enter a big bloomapalooza phase and I bet 20-30% of my new seedlings would have been culled and tossed into the compost pile.

The photo below shows several other groups of protected brugs. The larger group in the back center is made up of 10ft tall stock plants.  Within that group is at least 100 seed pods in various stages of development.  The trailer on the left is used for storage of supplies, but now it has been gutted and is full of many of my favorite plants.  it is also the only group of plants that has heat. The poor 3 gallon brug in the center was one that had rooted itself deeply in the ground and wasn't special enough to protect.  You can see the beating it already took in last night's freeze.

Had just a light freeze been in the forecast, then most of these plants would have remained uncovered and I would have just ran the overhead sprinklers to protect the plants with a layer of ice. Once the weather forecast changed to a hard freeze i knew I had to take more drastic actions.

At least now I'll have a jump start on some of my spring cleaning.  Many of these seedlings are a couple of years old and were just growing on top of the ground.  All the new seedlings now grow on ground cloth to keep them from rooting into the ground below.  This large area was scheduled to be cleaned and covered with cloth in spring.  Now I can move that task up a few months early.   

To cover as many plants as possible in the smallest amount of space, plants were stacked diagonally pot to pot. The one covered group in the front center of the photo above consisted of over 1,500 gallon sized pots.  Many of these plants were getting ready to bloom for the very first time.  I still have not figured out what my strategy will be when I pull the covers off on Thursday.  It is impossible to keep a 5-6ft tall plant in a gallon pot in an upright position on its own. :)

Here are a bunch of 3 gallon seedlings stacked and ready to be covered.
 
Only one group of plants did not receive the protective layer of poly. The group below just received a double layer of frost cloth. This group contains some of my oldest and tallest seedlings.  Many of the plants were 12 feet tall and taller.  They were all knocked down close to the ground to make it easier for me to cover them. 

To really appreciate the beauty of this storm cloud, you have to view it by itself.  What a beauty!

You can always see what the weather is like at my place by checking out my personal weather station and weather cam.  The cam faces towards the west and often captures our beautiful sunsets.

Florida has some of the most beautiful sunsets you'll ever encounter.  Here's some recent shots I took while strolling through my Brugmansia forest at sundown.

It is almost as if the sky is on fire..

Of course if I was living in southern California I would be afraid that the sky may actually be on fire...

Sunrise and sundown are the best time of day to admire Angel Trumpets during our hot Florida summers.

Seeing how I'm sort of playing catch-up here I thought I would share a few photos from the post-freeze clean-up.  To recap, the winter of 2009 was said to be the worst ever here in Central Florida.  I had planned to build a large shade house last fall to protect my brugs, but was not able to do so.  I relied on frost cloth, plastic sheeting, and an endless supply of water to protect my brugs.  The damage was great and I estimate that I lost about 30% of my plants.

Here's a photo from early spring after I had cut back many of my larger brugmansia seedlings to the ground.


I was excited to see many of the plants sprouting new growth shortly after I did my pruning.  Before the month-long clean-up process was over i ended up with several large piles of dead brug cuttings like the one below. 


I also learned to be very careful when handling large quantities of brugmansia branches.  When I was cleaning up this mess the temps were near 80 so I opted to work shirtless and in shorts....BIG MISTAKE! At the time many of the branches were still oozing out sap and of course I got completely coated with the stuff.  By the end of the day I was not feeling well and it took me almost a week to feel normal again.  I handle brugs all the time and have never had this happen before, even when I spend a day taking fresh cutting to propagate.  I'm sure it was just the result of me be glazed over by all the sap.

Rather than burn the piles as I have done in the past, I'm letting them decompose to avoid potential dangers from clouds of burning brugmansia smoke.

I will have my shadehouse and greenhouse built by this fall so i hope to never see piles of dead brugs like this again!

Central Florida's chilly winter this year is going into the record books as the coldest in nearly 30 years.  The National Weather Service stated this week that this has been the coldest winter season on record since 1981.  Winter does not appear to want to give up its hold on us so we could be on the way to setting the record as the coldest winter season on record.

The only upside to all this is that our much-needed rainfall has been above average this winter. 

I say let's close the record books and bring on spring!

Just kidding of course, I like Canadians.....however, their weather etiquette leaves something to be desired!



Story by AccuWeather.com senior Meteorologist Brett Anderson.

So far this month, much of the Deep South and Middle Atlantic states have been hit with snowstorms and persistent cold.

Average temperatures since Feb. 1 have been a whopping 5 to 10 degrees below normal! So what's going on?

An unusually strong and persistent area of high pressure over northern Canada has been forcing much of the cold air well south into the southeastern United States, leaving much of central and northeastern Canada relatively mild with a lack of snowfall.

It appears that this blocking pattern could persist through much of the rest of this month, keeping the eastern half of the nation in the deep freeze.

Thank you Canucks!

Two weekends ago I cut back several thousand brug seedlings that were damaged by our freeze. I also learned a valuable lesson, you really can get sick from handling brugs. I have not had a problem in the past, but I think because so many of the stems I cut back were oozing out sap, and the fact that I was wearing shorts and no shirt, was a bad combination. At first I just had puffy eyes and a major headache, but later ended up with cold like symptoms and insomnia.  It was not a pleasant experience, but I'm pleased to report that I am doing fine now.

Here is how my seedling growing area looked one morning of the freeze.



I ran the sprinklers in hopes that the ice would form a blanket and protect the plants. It did the job until we had two nights of 10+ hours below freezing with the temperature bottoming out at 25-26.

This is how everything looked a couple of weeks after the freeze -



Not all my brugs look as bad as these. I protected about 100 larger stock plants and lots of 4" plants that came through with little damage.

After two days of pruning things started to look a little bit better.



Although most of the tops were damaged, I believe the ice saved most of the seedlings. Had they not been iced over, the pots may have froze solid, killing the roots.

I still have lots of cleaning up to do to remove all the cuttings. I also have another growing area with larger plants that need selective pruning as they only received minor damage.



The good news is that as I was pruning I could already see new growth sprouting out from the base of many of the plants.

Next year I assure you I will have my greenhouse built for sure!

The smell of death is the air as plants damaged by Florida's recent devastating freeze succumb to Mother Nature's wrath. The visual impact is bad enough without the need to max out the senses with the smell of decaying foliage.  

I thought I would share some pictures of the ugliness in my yard. At least I have enough evergreen plants scattered around to balance out the signs of death.

My dog Inga blends in well with many shades of brown the freeze has generated. Here you'll see brunfelsia (foreground) and tibouchina (background) showing severe damage.

I guess I should not expect any bananas this spring.

The clerodendron (right) really took a beating. The acacia on the left will have to be cut back to the ground.

My yard grown brugmansia look like death warmed over.

The gold dust croton is one of the hardier types of crotons and it also succumbed to the cold this winter.

It would be cool if this Ixora would keep this nice bronze color year round.

This giant king sago is going to need a major pruning next month, something I am not looking forward to because of the serrated stems.

I'll use my lawn mower to trim the asparagus fern. I have large beds of sprengeri plus some smaller plantings of meyer (below).

More photos to come....