Lawn and Garden
Prepare for Winter
Around Thanksgiving, our first freeze is expected. This means you have some time to prepare plants for winter. The winter forecast for us is cooler than normal temperatures with wetter than normal conditions.
If you have potted plants that you bring indoors make sure they are insect free. Once indoors, there are no natural predators to control problem insects, and their populations can balloon. Inspect leaf backs and new growth for sucking insects like aphids, white flies and spider mites. Either prune back the plant to eliminate these pests that feed on new growth or apply some other control like soap sprays.
Inspect under outdoor containerized plants to make sure insects are not living underneath or taking shelter under the pot. For soil dwelling insect control, set the pot in a bucket which will then be filled with water. The insects will drown or float out of the soil.
You may want to leach the soil in the pot to eliminate excess salts. When outdoors natural rains can do this but once indoors, plants tend to be watered sparingly so salts can accumulate in the root zone.
For plants that are too large to be relocated, consider how you will provide cold protection. Covering the plant is a traditional method of providing freeze protection. Consider laying the plant down before covering. This will make the cover less likely to be blown off. It will also keep the plant warmer for heat comes out of the soil on cold nights and this will be trapped by the covered plant. Also, temperatures are higher at ground level than those a couple feet off the ground on freezing nights.
Just because a freeze is predicted, it does not mean that you must pick all the fruit off of your citrus tree. Listen to see how many hours below freezing are anticipated. Many times we do not reach freezing until just before sunrise and this is not a problem for the fruit. It takes several hours below freezing to ruin the citrus fruit.
To provide cold protection to tender plants in the landscape, you can flood the area they are in 24 hours before the freeze. Do this by running an open hose at the base of the plants. Moist soil retains heat on a cold night better then a dry soil. Keep some black plastic bags of leaves in a sunny area of the landscape. They can be placed at the base of tender plants at sundown. During the day the sun will heat up the contents of the bag and this residual heat will be released during the night.
