Jonqpublic, and anyone else. We had lots of snow and cold, I didn't see a lot of ice on things, but I would say it was freezing temps sometimes, but then one day we had it slushy for one afternoon before the evening froze it all again. Today, I took pics of my 2 older Live oaks, the 2 year olds that I posted above. My most borderline plus some, plants. The bigger one has brown leaves, but they are still attached. The second tree has it's leaves still, and they are less brown, but still pretty ugly. I am happy they have done as good as they have in this horrible and NOT OVER winter. I took the second pic from the porch with the zoom, but with the snow you can see it good enough. After today we will be getting single digits at night and 20's in the day for the next 3 days/nights. Then 20's and 30's after . I would say this winter makes me say zone 6 is fine for these Live oak "late drop". If they last the rest of the winter, which I think they will.

Shantung maple doesn't have aggressive root system like Norway or Silver maple. Metro Maples who sells shantung maple in DFW says it's more similar to Japanese maple. That's good enough for me. I planted them on both sides of the driveway, about 5-6 feet away. Another nice thing about it is that it produces a lot of bright yellow small flowers. You'd have to wait for them to get bigger first before they start to flower. A few years ago, a very strong storm blew through my town causing a lot of damage. I thought there was a tornado but probably not. I drove around the neighborhoods to gauge the strength of trees against this storm. I saw this bradford where half of the canopy fell off. Next year, another strong storm took out the rest that fell on the house. I wouldn't touch it. It's a crime that the builders plant bradford trees at the new house. They are EVERYWHERE now. I can see them losing them in 5-10 years and start all over having treeless lawn with 100+F* weather while a bunch of shantung maples around my house are still thriving and producing various of fall colors. I feel sorry for those folks who probably have no idea.

Ah, bustopher --reporting in from southeast Kansas where the ice storm has done SEVERE DAMAGE. Haven't had heat, electricity, TV, nor internet since Sunday morning. Got heat and electricty back this morning (that was two long cold nights!) and my cable (TV and internet) about an hour ago. Some people in town won't get heat, etc., until the end of the week! Haven't had time to worry about roses yet. Instead, trees falling down all over town. Hardly a yard that doesn't have big branches laying around. In many yards, big old trees split in half. BIG branches from my neighbor's oak tree took out my cable. Same thing happened to my neighbor on the other side. Saw a big pear tree split down the center, all the branches (except one)laying in a perfect circle around the stump/trunk. Got four big branches down in my yard, but fortunately they didn't hit anything except the ground. It is truly awful around here. It will be a wonder if we have any decent looking trees by next spring! Poor roses--yes, they took a big hit with the big Easter freeze last spring--took most of the summer for them to rebound. Now the big Xmas freeze--2 inches of ice on everything out there, including the roses (which were not dormant)--2 inches of ice for 2 1/2 days. It rained this afternoon, will freeze tonight--have no idea what things will look like by tomorrow. I have no idea what will survive, but I'm fearing I may have to buy lots of replacement roses in the spring. Just never have seen anything like the freezes we have had this year. Will let you know next spring what happens. Kate

Jessaka, More people "love their fruit trees to death" by overwatering and overfeeding them than kill them by neglecting them. I hardly ever water my yard or trees, and I never fertilize them, because all that does is push them into unnaturally fast growth. I want them to grow at the natural rate that corresponds to the actual rain that falls (or doesn't fall) from the sky. I know that, if all our native trees can survive, grow and produce fruit based on nothing but rainfall (we have lots of native fruit trees in our acres of woodland and semi-woodland), then so can the fruit trees I've planted near the house. That's just my own personal philosophy, though, but it is based on a lifetime of growing fruit trees and observing two things: (1) in rainier years, fruit trees have more insect problems and more disease issues, and (2) in rainier years, the fruit are larger but the flavor is watered down. Also, trees that get more moisture (whether rainfall or irrigation) carry heavier loads of fruit AND foliage, and limb breakage is more common. In a rainier year, it seems like limb breakage (even on properly pruned trees) is much worse than it is in drier years. So, my trees get only rainfall or perhaps an inch or two of rain per month in drought periods when there is no rain at all and they never give me trouble. I read somewhere once that peach and apricot trees grow best in a couple of feet of sandy soil on top of clay. In that type of soil conditions, they have the good drainage provided by the sandy soil and they have good deep soil moisture in the clay beneath the sand. I choose the planting location for our trees based on that....they are in the sandiest soil I have and that band of sandy soil lies on top of thick, red Oklahoma clay, and so far it has worked out really well. It has worked out so well, in fact, that I wish our band of sandier soil were wider so I could plant more fruit trees there. We have some neighbors a couple of miles up the road who have about 6 or 8 fruit trees (judging from their size, they are semi-dwarfs) planted by the previous homeowners. These trees are so far from the house and water faucet, that I don't think you COULD water them, unless you have a couple of hundred feet of water hose, or carry water to them in buckets. They only get natural rainfall, therefore, and have been covered in fruit this year, having somehow survived the late freezes and heavy winds. (They are in a pretty sheltered low-lying area with lots of trees and buildings around.) These are trees that get no special attention and still produce a crop that surprised even me, because the trees weren't looking good at all when I saw them in mid-July, but they had plenty of peaches, including some very yummy white-fleshed ones. So, sometimes I think that the less we interfere with Mother Nature, the better. The first year or two that we lived here, there was a drought and I watered WAY too much, trying to make up for the drought and for the fact that I hadn't improved the soil "enough" yet. (And I KNEW I was watering too much, but was afraid everything would die if I stopped.) I did have greener, lusher foliage but also had every disease and pest issue in the book, so I completely stopped fertilizing and cut the watering back to no more than 1" of water per week, and all the disease and pest issues vanished. So, less water and only natural compost/mulch as fertilizer gives me a less perfect-looking landscape but also less diseases and few pests. I don't know if watering less would solve all the problems you've had with your fruit trees or not, but it did for me. And, of course, you cannot control the amount of rainfall your plants receive. When I lived in Fort Worth, I probably overfertilized and overwatered our landscape too much, but I had lovely, lush St. Augustine grass and I liked keeping it thick and gorgeous. Here, though, I've learned that less is more, and in the times we live in with lots of water rationing, it is probably better to underwater than to overwater. That's just me and my experiences, though, and no one else has to become a "minimalist" at watering just because I prefer it, but it works here for me in our soil and our climate. Dawn