Hey everyone,
I was just curious how everyone's plants fared the recent arctic blast and how cold it got at your locations. I think it'd be interesting to compare temps and see what species fared well, since we're prone to these week long cold blasts every other year or so.
I'm in Rochester, in Southwestern Washington - it's about twenty miles south of Olympia and is in the Chehalis River valley. At the coldest, it hit 6ºF (-14ºC) here according to my min-max thermometer. Here's a list of my 'borderline' plants - the ones that are just on the border of being able to grow or maybe not, but I'm trying to grow anyway:
Arbequina olive - about half of the leaves have died on it and are falling off. I think it will survive, but with all this damage even after putting a blanket over it and placing heated fire bricks underneath it, I'm not sure how well it will do over the long term, since I obviously can't keep doing that once it's a larger tree.
Sochi Tea - about a third of the leaves have turned dark green and I think are damaged. I covered it with a blanket and placed a heated fire brick underneath it to protect it. It'll definitely survive from the looks of it, though it took quite a beating.
Rosemary - tips died back, but it did much better than I thought it would
Lavender - made it through great. Surprised me actually.
Gotu kola - I had it in an unheated
greenhouse. The plant was actually frozen solid when I brought it inside (it's in a planter), as was the soil it was planted in. It survived fine, with no visible damage. I think it's a lot more frost tolerant than I think it is.
I also
should note that one species I tried growing a year or two ago was tea tree (Melaleuca alternifolia), the plant tea tree oil is made from. It's
native to southeast Australia, and well, it can't take cold well as I found out. I brought it indoors when we had the several week long arctic blast back in 2008 - but the next winter, it got wiped out.
Cheers,
Adam
