Question of the Week
browse by: questions
How do I protect my tender plants and vegetables from frost?
As temperatures drop to freezing and below, we want to protect our vegetables, citrus, cold-tender tropicals and some agaves and succulents. With succulents, check their tolerance for cold temps. Many are fine.
For those you need to protect, cover with a light sheet or blanket: not plastic. You can also buy row cover at your local nursery. These days, this white permeable fabric is often sold in packages as N-Sulate or other names. Some nurseries carry row cover in varying weights by the yard. But if you don't have that, a blanket or sheet will work.
Whatever you choose, be sure to anchor it well. You can use bricks or rocks or jute pins. You want to make sure that no air comes in around the bottom of the plant; that's very important.
We are lucky that it only usually gets bitter cold for just a few hours; it doesn't stay extreme cold for very long during the night. It normally gets cold towards the morning and then the sun comes up and things warm up very quickly.
So, cover your plants late in the day and remove that covering the next morning when we get a little bit of sun. We're also lucky in that respect in that our winters are fairly sunny, so that you can let the ground and the plant warm back up.
You do want to water well around your plants but you don't want to get the soil soaking wet and you don't want to get any water on your plants, since that water may freeze on the leaves.
Mulch cold-tender perennials, like Esperanza (yellow bells), Pride of Barbados, and others that freeze back.
Your larger plants and your trees can be more challenging such as the citrus, but if these are well established mature trees they do have a lot of carbohydrates in their trunk system that they can come back from if we don't have cold for very long. Again, you want to cover those with some sort of sheet or blanket if at all possible, and anchor that to the ground, which may be difficult with larger specimens. For smaller citrus, consider a teepee of bamboo or other structure to which you can anchor your protective cloth.
Related Episodes
