Editor, I am so happy to see your great start. Remember to post your container count on the official thread. It truly is addicting, and seeing you excitement brings back memories of my first season. I am very happy for you. I really hate to do this, and I REALLY hope my suspicions are wrong, but I have to ask you something about those lovely containers. Do they say anywhere on them, in tiny print, that they are made of corn? I bought organic greens at Sam's last year and was really excited about the container. It turns out it was made of corn (yeah, corn?) and melted into a shapeless mess when washed in hot water. I set them outside to see what would happen and the sun destroyed them. I really hope that's not the same thing you have, but if it is, better to find out now before the season gets too far along. Hoping to be wrong, Seedmama

Well guys my better half reminded me that I DO have a Pet that happens to be a CAT!!And also he does bring strays for lunch he is an outside cat with house privileges! He normally brings a cat for lunch then a different cat for dinner,my minino(his name)comes inside the house checks the house out and he is ready to go back outside-rain or shine- so it was probably him and his friends camping out on my plants!!GRRR. I did check my plants and they look like they are not too bad(I hope)blak leaves some of the trunks were soft so they got cut.My jasmines look pretty bad,so I also cut them back my geraniums well they are gone,so I cut up to the dirt level the Hibiscus they look o.k. no leaves just sticks, my donkey ears well they are cook! but I did have 2 or 3 babies inside the house my cactis they are completely fried.I will keep my fingers crossed and see if everything comes to life.My pineaple plant looks pretty good. My brugies they look alive but sad no leaves so I watered everything and closed up the tent again!!this time I used some elastic ties so even if the cat(s) manage to get back inside at least the tarp will not stay open that big of a gap.

CW - you may find these copy/paste jobs of comments I left on other threads to be of some interest: Your question more closely asks what temperatures will my tree tolerate, but it leaves unanswered the question of what temps are best. It would be best if you could keep actual soil temperatures above 25 and below 42* for the winter. Here is a longer explanation about cold-hardiness I left on this forum previously. If it leaves you with questions, just ask: Commonly, each species of plant has a general range of cold-hardiness. Within species and cultivar, cold-hardiness is genetically determined. That is to say that a plant that is propagated from cuttings or tissue culture will have the same ability to resist cold as the parent plant. Plants cannot "develop" a greater degree of cold-hardiness by repeated or prolonged exposure to cold, even after 100 years (trees). If we pick any plant at random, it may or may not be able to withstand freezing temperatures. The determining factor is the plants ability to prevent freezing of bound water. Bound water is the water inside of cells. There are actually three kinds of water to consider when we discuss "freezing". The water held in soil - When this water freezes, and it can freeze the soil mass solid, it doesn't necessarily kill the plant or tissues. Then there is free or unbound water, also called inter-cellular water. This is water that is found in plant tissues, but is outside of living cells cells. This water can also freeze solid and not kill the plant. The final type of water is bound water or intra-cellular water. If temperatures drop low enough to freeze this water, the cell/tissue/plant dies. This is the freeze damage that kills plants. Fortunately, nature has an antifreeze. Even though temperatures drop well below freezing, all plants don't die. In hardy plants, physiological changes occur as temperatures drop. The plant moves solutes (sugars, salts, starches) into cells and moves water out of cells to inter-cellular spaces in tissues. These solutes act as antifreeze, allowing water in cells to remain liquid to sometimes extremely low temperatures. The above is a description of super-cooling in plants. Some plants even take advantage of another process to withstand very low temps called intra-cellular dehydration. The roots of your trees can stay frozen for extended periods or go through multiple freeze/thaw cycles w/o damage, so long as the temperature does not fall below that required to freeze intra-cellular water. If roots remain frozen, but temperatures remain above killing lows, dessication is the primary concern. If the tree is able to take up water, but temperatures are too low for the tree to grow and make food, stored energy becomes the critical issue. Dormant and quiescent trees are still using energy from their reserves (like a drain on a battery). If those reserves are depleted before the tree can produce photosynthesizing mass, the organism dies. There are a number of factors that have some affect on the cold-hardiness of individual plants, some of which are length of exposure to seasonal cold, water availability (drought stressed plants are more cold tolerant), how recently planted/repotted, etc No one can give a definitive answer that even comes close to accurately assessing the temperature at which bound water will freeze that covers the whole species. Unbound water is of little concern & will usually freeze somewhere around 28*. Some material will be able to withstand little cold & roots could freeze/die at (actual) root temperatures as warm as 25-27*. Other plants may tolerate much colder actual root temperatures - as low as 10*. There's just no way of knowing unless you have a feeling for how cold-tolerant the genetic material the plant was derived from might be, and finding out is expensive (from the plant's perspective). ;o) Another example of this genetic variance is that trees found growing and fruiting well closer to the equator need no chill time, while other trees, derived of genetic stock from a more northerly provenance may need a period of chill to grow with optimum vitality in the subsequent growth period/cycle. It's wise to remember that root death isn't instantaneous at one particular temperature. Roots succumb to cold over a range of chill with cultural conditions affecting the process. The finest roots will die first, and the slightly thicker and more lignified roots will follow, with the last of the roots to succumb being the more perennial and thickest roots. Since any root death is a setback from an energy allocation perspective, and root regeneration takes valuable time, it's probably best to keep actual root temperatures in the 25-40* range as long as we can when the tree is resting, even though the organism as a whole could tolerate much lower temperatures. Even well established trees become very much like cuttings if all but the roots essential to keep the tree viable are lost to cold. Regeneration of roots is an expensive energy outlay and causes the trees to leaf out later than they normally would and shortens the natural growth period and reduces the potential increase in biomass for the next growth cycle and perhaps beyond. and We know that when trees are exposed to freezing, the finest hair roots - the ones that do the lions share of the work are the first to die. In many woody plants, these roots begin to die as soil temperatures drop below 30-32*. As temperatures drop further, larger and larger roots succumb to killing low temperatures. The point is - that many trees that SURVIVE are left with only the largest roots to support them because much of the rootage has frozen. These trees are slow to respond in the spring because they need to utilize stored energy to regenerate lost rootage before they can move sufficient water and the nutrients dissolved in water to support either growth or the flush of foliage that makes the food that allows the tree to grow (this, in the case of deciduous material). So, while trees might survive exposure to borderline killing low temperatures unprotected, we KNOW it is better for the tree, especially from an energy management perspective, if we give them protection that ensures actual root temperatures don't drop low enough to kill even the finest roots. For most temperate trees, that means we should strive to keep low root temperatures in the upper 20s at their lowest, and below 42* to keep them from growing until spring when we can get them into good light w/o worrying about frost/freeze. Hope that helped. Al

If your area is not dropping to 32 degrees, I'd say there's a good chance you can get away with covering. However, this night-time cold spell looks to last for several days. What kinds of stuff are you talking about?