Yes, it will harm it. Your tree isn't going to enter protective dormancy during a period of increasing day length, so it needs to be protected from frost and rapid temperature drops. Plants can suffer severe injury from cold, even if they don't freeze. An example might be moving a tree from a 70* house to a front porch when it's 35* - not enough to freeze the plant, but more than enough to cause chill injury. My guess is that you weren't using cold-pressed neem oil and the damage wasn't from the neem itself, but from the vehicle or other additives in the concoction. Why do you have it indoors in the first place? Al

Hi - I don't know if that tree can be saved, but I do wonder if it hasn't been watered too often - yellow leaves are usually a sign of that. It's always best to learn a tree's water needs not from a meter or by a schedule, but by getting to know the tree itself and seeing how it responds to watering, how much, how often, in what season, how heavy the pot is at times directly after watering and then later on, etc. You do live in a warm place, and 'dormancy' there would be relative compared to e.g. what iut would mean in the NE. Water isn't always the answer to overheating, but a cooler, or at least partly shaded location might be. I wonder also if it may have had too much sun in a window there - I don't know and can't say of course, but it's another thing to consider. And not knowing your soil mix is another. Sometimes it's best to just let a tree relax (along with yourself :-) a bit rather than treating it like a rigid mechanical thing... let the tree tell you who it is and hearing what it wants. I know how that sounds, but they are liviung things after all but haven't necessarily read the rule books! Good luck and don't be discouraged from trying again - we all lose trees along the way and sometimes it's not about 'us' at all. This post was edited by moochinka on Tue, Mar 18, 14 at 8:46

Hi David, please leave your tree where it is until spring, right before the buds are about to open (not just when they first appear). You won't be able to do anything with it in winter anyhow as it will be asleep (dormant) and not ready to grow, and cutting any part of it may still stimulate mechanics of growth, but if buds do appear and open (before winter) the whole tree could die. Don't grow it indoors ever if you can manage that because it will do so much better outside. Can I ask you why you think it is a Chinese elm (rather than some other kind of elm)? I'm from Quebec and it's really unlikely to be a Chinese one growing wild. If you do dig it up in spring, don't use a terracotta pot, but a wide one only tall enough so that when the tree is in it, the roots reach the bottom, then fill in around them with a good bonsai mix (no potting soil or peat please) of aquarium gravel (you can get nice natural looking brownish ones), perlite and some small bark chips (maybe pine mulch that's been cut up enough so it's not 'shredded' too much, and will allow water to run through it quickly. Also make sure it gets plenty of sun. In another couple of years you could put it in a bonsai pot.

Hmmmm - if these trees are volunteers, it's at least AS likely, and probably MORE likely they are actually U pumila, rather than U parvifolia. Pumila (zone 3) is much hardier than parvifolia (zone 5). The shed: It's not that temperatures might get low, or below freezing in a shed, it's >how low WILL they go? IOW, frozen soil won't kill them, but soil temperatures lower than they are genetically programmed to withstand WILL. In their natural range, they never see 6" (deep) soil temperatures much below 25*, so they will probably not tolerate actual soil temperatures much below 15-20*. If your shed is tight & not riddled with holes so the shed is effectively able to trap and hold geothermal heat rising through the floor, you're prolly in good shape, but if the shed allows lots of air infiltration so that the temperature is pretty much the same as ambient air temps, I'd say you're in trouble. Lack of light is not an issue for dormant deciduous trees until they wake in spring. Do you have a spot where you could bury the container and mulch until it's time to leave? I would choose that option, or an attached, unheated garage before I would opt for the shed. Al