Recently in Weather Category

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....

Last week's freeze was the biggest cold event in over 20 years according to the local media.  I'm hoping that it will be at least another 20 until we have another one!   For those of you who do not think it gets very cold in Central Florida, I thought I would share a few photos from my winter wonderland here in Clermont.

Citrus really took a beating this time.  I spot checked a bunch of oranges on scattered trees and all showed signs of cold damage.

I had to rely on constant watering to protect my large Angel Trumpet seedlings growing in the open.  With several consecutive nights of 10+ hours below freezing, ice accumulated quickly.

Even though I turned the sprinklers off when the temperature reached 37, piles of ice were still present when I had to start the sprinklers  up again after sundown.

While an acre of glistening ice may have been a beautiful sight to some, now that the temperatures are back to normal it is not a pretty sight at all.

The photo above gives a whole new meaning to the term "Frozen Orange Juice".  Those oranges had accumulated over an inch of ice during the course of the evening. I'll be busy squeezing lots of oranges this weekend, filling my freezer up with fresh OJ.  Once an orange suffers freeze damage you have 7-10 days to use it before it spoils.

This is a new cactus called "icicle cactus".  Cool, isn't it!  :)

I hope this is the last external garden ice I have to see for quite some time.

With record setting cold blanketing Central Florida this week, nothing was spared from Mother nature's wrath.

This orange tree happened to be on the outer fringes of my outdoor brugmansia growing area and got caught by my sprinklers during the sub freezing weather.  The sprinklers were on to provide a protective ice blanket for my brugmansia during the freezes. 

I'm not sure if it has gotten cold enough to damage the citrus yet, but many of my brugs took a beating.  We have a hard freeze warning in effect for the next couple of days so the worst may be yet to come.  Tonight's forecast predicts the lowest temperatures of the winter and seeing how it is has only reached 34f by noon today, it does not look good.

I'll have a better idea of the extent of the damage a couple of weeks from now.

My field of Angel Trumpets has turned into a Winter Wonderland as the icicles glisten under the Florida sunshine.

Of course this is no Winter Wonderland for me, it is devastating to say the least. It is too early to tell what the extent of the freeze damage is, plus another hard freeze is forecast for tonight with more cold weather moving in on the weekend.

With temperatures finally above freezing, the sprinklers are working hard to melt the protective cover of ice that was formed overnight.  They ran from 11:00pm last night to 10:00am this morning.


The rooted brugmansia cuttings below were waiting to be moved up to 4" pots for spring sales.  When I checked on them when during lunch, it looks like the ice worked its magic and kept them from being severely damaged.

Here's an Angel Trumpet seedling carry over from last year.  It is a cross from brugmansia Pink Beauty x Native Habitat Double Peach.

This brugmansia, with its  super-sized blooms, put on such a show last year that I just could not stand to toss it out.  This past Spring I planted it in my yard where it has been performing nicely ever since.

The blooms start out white and then slowly age to a nice peach color.  While it is blooming you end up with white, peach, and in-between colored blooms on the plant at the same time.  This Angel Trumpet likes to grow tall and is a perfect candidate to grow as a standard.  I'm still not sure if I will register this one or just leave it grow in my yard.  It is a real attention grabber when it flushes out with blooms.

Right now I dropped the plant down to the ground so I could cover it in advance of the  mega-freeze that is grabbing hold of Florida this week.  If it survives the freeze, it will earn its keep for sure.