Considering the interweb is the "new fence" over which we all lean and compare notes, for those of you here in Central Texas, who along with me yesterday stood and shook your heads over some 40 to 60 minutes of intermittent snow flurries as you realized the worst to get through would be however many hours of bitter cold we faced last night, well now I'd like to know.How cold did it get at your place last night?
Around 8AM it is already back up to 31 degrees but here in Rollingwood our low was 28 degrees according to our digital thermometer. Although it stores that information, it does not specify when that low occurred or how long it stayed below freezing here. However long that was, it was:
Long enough for the bird bath out back to form a thin sheen of ice on top.
Long enough the water in the rain barrels froze a little up top under the screening.
Long enough for the redbud tree out front and the hackberry tree out back to be losing their leaves, a few at a time, simply dropping them in a neat circle round their trunks.
Long enough to frost the grass.
Long enough to rime the uncovered kale babies and mint.
Long enough for some typical suspects to die outright, like the poke plants. The collards, along with other broad leafed plants may lose a few leaves, but typically they don't die outright. 
Typically it doesn't freeze hard this early either so......All that remains now is to wait until the temperatures are safely above freezing to pull the improvised coverings off the various beds and survey potential damage. Some may not turn up for a day or so, but hopefully, most of the covered plants have survived to thrive in the more typical above freezing winter weather here. Fingers crossed.....
Pretty frozen birdbath! I'm embarrassed to admit we don't have a thermometer outside, so I don't know EXACTLY how cold it was here, but the WeatherUnderground site indicates it was 28.2. I just uncovered everything and am now going to pull out the dead basil. I covered the rest of the veggies well enough that they look fine right now--whoo-hoo!
ReplyDeleteMy thermometer is the old-fashioned kind that only shows me the current temp, so I don't know how low we got either. It was definitely a hard freeze here in NW Austin though.
ReplyDeleteYes, well ladies, the perfect gift for that weather geek in your life (if you have one and I have several) is that digital thermometer that tells you the temperatures indoors and out, and saves the high/low extremes to date. Our indoor station is by the closet so we "know" how to get dressed daily (yeah, I know, kind of sad....).
ReplyDeleteWell..here at our house in Wimberley..with an old fashioned thermometer on the deck, it was 19 degrees. That was at 8:00 a.m. I'm not sure if that was the lowest. The water in the birdbaths was frozen solid. I didn't think to look at the rain barrels.
ReplyDeleteI hope we didn't lose too much, here. Not ready for it to be that cold this early.
Linda: Yikes! I just finished clearing out freeze damage in one front bed (I see it all the time and the straggly looking mushy stuff was making me nutso) only to double check and sure enough - more freezing temps on the way tonight.
ReplyDeleteI sense a lot of covering and uncovering yet to come. I wonder how long before I give that up and let everything not in a pot I can move into the garage or indoors just take its chances?