ugh, I hope it won't be bad either Bet. Let's banish the thought.

Carla

It says 35 for us here. Hmm

Weeds, in fact, are great. Just pull them and toss them over at risk basal breaks. Chickweed, with water filled succulent leaves, is especially good. Oxalis covers well and if you've lots of henbane, it will make do.

With the sun as high as it is in the sky at this point in time, 28 degrees at 6 AM is no big deal. If the temps were to be 28 degrees, day and night for a week, I would be worried, but since it's not, well, it's a tiny ripple on the pond, and nothing to get all exorcised about. It's spring in Georgia again and these are the types of things we all should be used to by now. Your roses should survive nicely, and bedding plants just need to be covered overnight. Just be sure to get them uncovered before the sun hits them or they'll be hurt.

UGH...and I mini pruned yesterday. Have so much tender new growth...I am throwing dry cleaner bags on them for any "freezes"...guess it's not over til it's over

Going to be 22 degrees here tomorrow. All my roses are covered in new growth. I haven't decided if I'm going to do nothing and hope it is warmer than NOAA predicts or go out and spray with Wilt Pruf.

Kate

Kate, thank you for reminding me. I WiltPruf. I'm going to spray on Sunday.

You are welcome Buford. You know I have never actually used the WiltPruf for this purpose. To that end I called Wilt Pruf just now about if they thought it would create a good buffer against short term cold or be useful at all against cold temperatures like this.

The WP I have it in the ready to use spray bottle. They said that they could not endorse the use of their product on roses but that they've heard some rose societies use and recommend it. They said also I was taking my chances using it and to be sure I understood it was at my own risk. Also that it was primarily designed for use on broadleaf evergreens and to in theory dilute to 1 (part Wilt Pruf) to 20 parts water if I did use it. Apparently the ratio in the ready to use bottle is 1 part WP to 10 parts water.

I'm only sharing this because I don't have experience using this product on my roses. I bought it because I thought I might want to do so but the woman at the 'help' line made me kind of nervous.

It sounds like you have first hand experience however so I'm sure you are up on its safe application. I have to read more about the topic before I get out there and spray my roses I think.

Thanks.

Kate

Kate, I've never actually used it. In fact, I bought it after the last big freeze. However, I do know that several here on GW have used it on roses, sometimes combined with a fungicide. I had wanted to give my roses a dose of fungicide since they leafed out and I have already seen some small signs of BS, but it's been raining almost non-stop for two weeks (not that I'm complaining!)so I haven't been able to.

I have the concentrate, so I'll have to figure out what mixture to use. I think the 1-20 sounds about right. I may spray my hydrangeas and Japanese Maples too. They sufferered great damage last late freeze and are already partly leafed out.

The help desk person was making the point that anti-transpirants are recommended to protect evergreens from death by dessication when their shallow roots are frozen for a long time and they can't replace the water being lost by their leaves. (When rhododendrons curl their leaves, they are trying to reduce water loss.)

I can't see how anti-transpirants would have any effect against actual freezing of the tissues in any plant. Water loss is not a problem during transient freezes.

I don't have to worry, my roses are still covered!!!

ARRRRGH!!!! Right when everything gets all leafed out and pretty here comes Old Man Winter!! All my perennials are up outta the dirt like hosta and phlox and the shrubby perennials like azaleas, weigelia and deutizia are loaded with buds. I was hoping all my roses would be OK but all that new growth might bite the dust. I repeat --- ARRRRGH!!!!! Makes me want to cry. I guess all we can do is hope for the best, plus place a few boxes and sheets over some things. Judy

I hope this doesn't happen to you. The cold was down to 19F, but it was the cold coupled with humidity that killed. There was officially 11" of snow Friday and Friday night, but it drifted to 3' on the south side. All the new growth that was encased in snow has been killed, even on hollies and euomymous. 3/4 of the snow melted away Saturday. 3L bottle domes kept 9 starter roses undamaged at the front of the house under the snow! Our last average freeze date is on tax day, but it has been as low as 25F after that.

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elgrillo,
that's the saddest trilogy I've seen in a long, long time.
May I suggest cutting off the dead and soft before fungi move in and spread into the still alive (and soft) next to it?
Ann

Ann,

Thanks for the shoulder to cry on.

Do you mean trim the clematis soon? I have not tried to raise them until DW and I moved to this home in 2003, so this is the first time that I have seen them turn to cooked spinach. It's remarkable to me that these 5yr clematis were frozen back, yet a newly planted 18" Jackmanii that didn't get snow-packed remained undamaged.

It's just part of our climate that provides different rose pruning date every year, usually in early March, then trim out the freeze-kill after mid-April when necessary. The sparsity of fruit production and same pruning cycle applies to fruit trees. The first rose flush will be a week or two late this year.

Gary

Wind. We have wind again today, up to 40 miles per hour in gusts. And tomorrow? More wind. A couple of my new bands got busted when they blew over. There is a huge antique show in progress out on the prairie, and those poor people have had to deal with rain and howling wind just about the whole two weeks...tents were collapsing.
Maybe the gardens of England are so beautiful because they do not get the extremes we do. Is there any part of the USA where the weather is calm and benevolent?...oh yeah, Hawaii.
Gary, those are some sad pictures, I agree with Ann.

elgrillo, those pictures bring back bad memories. If those are clematis on the arbor, I'd cut them back to the ground. I do this with my clematis all the time and they come back.

I don't know if the Wilt-Pruf will help, but some say it prevents the drying from the cold and therefore the damage. It is supposed to help with fungus as well, so I may as well use it anyway.

Thanks Buford. It's been windy here, too, with wind chills in the teens and twenties. Everything dries out quickly with high winds and low humidity, so fungus is usually not a problem. I'll try to prune anything dead away since they have been hard-pruned already.

Gary

We got nipped by a rain/freezing rain/snow storm last weekend, but it didn't get quite as cold as predicted. However, we are supposed to by around 70 this weekend and down around 20 sometime next week. My roses are trying to leaf out; the lilacs are trying to bloom; some spring bulbs are blooming; some trees are blooming and trying to bloom. It almost sounds like the Easter freeze 2 years ago, and Easter is coming up again. My roses have not fully recovered from the freeze two years ago. What I am doing is keeping all my new plants in pots indoors under lights until the weather credibly warms up and asking the nurseries I buy from not to ship until after April 10. Even so, I have already gotten two orders.

I can only hope that we don't have a repeat of TBEF from 2007 that killed 50+ of my roses. The temps were down to 12-14 degrees for 3 days solid before they started to warm up. I hadn't done any pruning at all that year when TBEF hit. All of the new growth was killed off that year so the roses were playing catch-up all year long. I lost mainly mini's and mini-floras with just a few HT's and FL's thrown in for good measure.
I don't think it is supposed to get that bad this year by any means, at least not in my area--Northwest Missouri just North of Kansas City.
I have started my pruning this year and will be done on Saturday I think. If that is the case, I will be able to cover my bushes to provide them some protection from the cold. I have many 7-10 gallon containers that I will put over the tenderest of my roses to protect them. They are black, so that means that the containers will generate a little heat if the sun is shining at all.
I am keeping my fingers crossed big time this year. I have some Wilt-Pruf, but don't know if I will use it on my bushes or not as added protection.
What do you think??
John

I think, and the help-desk person apparently thinks, that WP will not help. As far as I know, there is no theory as to why it should work, no evidence that it does work, no claim by the manufacturer that it works for transient freezes on deciduous plants.

The forecast for Tuesday here currently is for 30F and snow, not a problem for roses. Looks like we get by without the usual late March or early April rose damage. Now if the rabbits would just stop it.

My roses are not leafed out yet, for the most part--still just budding, so I hope they won't be vulnerable at all. I do have some basal breaks that I am going to make sure are covered with a little mulch, but aside from that I'll just have to hope for the best. We're supposed to get snow, and temps down to the low 20's with lots of wind, but that's not uncommon here for the beginning of April, so I can't whine too much.

I'm kind of sad about my lilac, it had a lot of flower buds and was finally going to put on a good show this year--wahhh!! And my star magnolia--sigh! I guess I should look at spring once-bloomers actually BLOOMING as a pleasant surprise, not a yearly feature to be counted on here in the Midwest, but hope springs eternal.

Here, the star magnolia and other early ones are almost always ruined by frosts in mid to late March. They are like repeating roses, always jumping the gun.

Robert Lowell writes of their "murderous six-days' white," but here it's moldy beige.

Forcast for next week includes two nights of 27 and 28 degree temperatures (or lower). Anything under 30 does at least some damage from my experience, and two nights with those low temps doesn't bode well for tender new growth (no rose is dormant here by now). I had to prune some of them back as the snow load from last week broke some major canes (Elgrillo's pics says it all) but I hadn't done the major spring prune yet this year. When locals ask me when to prune their roses they are looking for an exact date. March 17th (St. Pats day) is the tentative date I give them, but warn them to look at the forcast. I can remember a late spring freeze one year that took my 5 foot, fully leafed out Chrysler Imperial down to crown level. For a newbie it's hard to understand that as far as the weather is concerned "we are not in charge" in Oklahoma. The long range forcast for our area was given in early spring as being drier and warmer then average for spring. Someone forgot to inform mother nature apparently.

We are suppose to get temps in the upper 30's at night on Tuesday and Wednesday, I really wish that old man winter would go away. But I guess this is to be expected, I found this map site which shows each zone's last frost date and according to the experts we are not suppose to do any pruning until after this date. Well I do my pruning way too early every year according to this map. Here is the link to that map below, and scroll down to get your zone's last frost date.

Here is a link that might be useful: Zone Map and Frost Dates