When you allow the roots of a plant to get congested to beyond the point where the soil and roots can be lifted from the pot intact, there will be encircling, girdling, j-hooked roots that will eventually grow larger and restrict the movement of water and nutrients to the upper part of the tree. It's not unusual for a home owner to plant out woody material with congested roots, only to see the plant struggle, stagnate, or simply die within a few years due to root issues carried over from the plants days in a nursery pot. I'm sure you've planted bedding plants from cell packs that had extremely congested roots, only to find that at the end of the growing season, if the plant is still viable, that it has grown very little & root growth had been nil. Had the bottom 2/3 of the root mass been ripped off & the rest of the rootage combed out a little, the plant would have grown normally. IF you pot up before that pivotal point where the roots/soil can be lifted from the pot, you can continue to do so w/o concern for growth vitality, but nurserymen know they need to bump plants up (to a larger pot) BEFORE that occurs or growth/vitality is restricted permanently. I SAY permanently, but that needs a qualifier. The affect on growth/vitality is permanent unless the root congestion is corrected during a repot or before planting out. Many people feel it's taboo to disturb the roots of plants when repotting or planting out, but that is a myth. Repotting actually stimulates root growth and even promotes blooming in flowering plants. I guard against guaranteeing that certain practices WILL make a huge difference because of other potentially limiting factors. I try to be as accurate in what I say on the forums as possible, so "within the limits of other cultural factors' is simply a way of saying that "yeah - repotting is a LOT better than potting up, and with all else being equal, repotted plants are going to outperform plants only potted up by a considerable degree - but there are other cultural influences that keep me from being able to promise that if you pot up it guarantees optimal growth." It guarantees the opportunity for optimal growth as long as other factors cooperate, but even if other factors cooperate, only potting up (after that pivotal point) is going to be a limiting issue at some point in the very near future. I see it all the time in my trees ...... I get too busy & think, "Gee, I'm out of time here. I think that plant can go another year before I need to repot it" only to see that plant decline in the summer months & limp into dormancy. When I repot it in the spring, it pouts for a week or two, then gets its feet under it and takes off, far surpassing it's counterparts that might only have been potted up. In your climate, I think you can repot the succulents easily and they'll be fine - into the gritty mix, hopefully? I would probably not do a full repot on the Pelargoniums until spring, but I would probably rip the bottom 1/3 of the roots off the root mass & score the sides of the root mass before potting them back into a similarly sized container in a soil similar to what they're in now. In spring, I'd bare-root and repot into the soil of your choice - hopefully one that is durable & drains freely. Something about potting up vs repotting from one of my threads: I have spent literally thousands of hours digging around in root-balls of trees (let's allow that trees means any woody plant material with tree-like roots) - tropical/subtropical trees, temperate trees collected from the wild and temperate nursery stock. The wild collected trees are a challenge, usually for their lack of roots close to the trunk, and have stories of their own. The nursery stock is probably the closest examples to what most of your trees are like below the soil line, so I'll offer my thoughts for you to consider or discard as you find fitting. I've purchased many trees from nurseries that have been containerized for long periods. Our bonsai club, just this summer, invited a visiting artist to conduct a workshop on mugo pines. The nursery (a huge operation) where we have our meetings happened to have purchased several thousand of the mugos somewhere around 10 - 12 years ago and they had been potted-up into continually larger containers ever since. Why relate these uninteresting snippets? In the cases of material that has been progressively potted-up only, large perennial roots occupied nearly the entire volume of the container, plant vitality was in severe decline, and soil in the original root-ball had become so hard that in some cases a chisel was required to remove it. In plants that are potted-up, rootage becomes entangled. As root diameters increase, portions of roots constrict flow of water and nutrients through other roots, much the same as in the case of girdling or encircling roots on trees grown in-ground. The ratio of fine, feeder roots to more lignified and perennial roots becomes skewed to favor the larger, and practically speaking, useless roots. Initial symptoms of poor root conditions are progressive diminishing of branch extension and reduced vitality. As rootage becomes continually compressed and restricted, branch extension stops and individual branches might die as water/nutrient translocation is further compromised. Foliage quality may not (important to understand) indicate the tree is struggling until the condition is severe, but if you observe your trees carefully, you will find them increasingly unable to cope with stressful conditions - too much/little water, heat, sun, etc. Trees that are operating under conditions of stress that has progressed to strain, will usually be diagnosed in the end as suffering from attack by insects or other bio-agents while the underlying cause goes unnoticed. I want to mention that I draw distinct delineation between simply potting up and repotting. Potting up temporarily offers room for fine rootage to grow and do the necessary work of water/nutrient uptake, but these new roots soon lignify, while rootage in the old root mass continues to grow and become increasingly restrictive. The larger and larger containers required for potting-up & the difficulty in handling them also makes us increasingly reluctant to undertake even potting-up, let alone undertake the task of repotting/root-pruning which grows increasingly difficult with each up-potting. So we are clear on terminology, potting up simply involves moving the plant with its root mass and soil intact, or nearly so, to a larger container and filling in around the root/soil mass with additional soil. Repotting, on the other hand, includes the removal of all or part of the soil and the pruning of roots, with an eye to removing the largest roots, as well as those that would be considered defective. Examples are roots that are dead, those growing back toward the center of the root mass, encircling, girdling or j-hooked roots, and otherwise damaged roots. I often explain the effects of repotting vs potting up like this: Let's rate growth/vitality potential on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the best. We're going to say that trees in containers can only achieve a growth/vitality rating of 9, due to the somewhat limiting effects of container culture. Lets also imagine that for every year a tree goes w/o repotting or potting up, its measure of growth/vitality slips by 1 number, That is to say you pot a tree and the first year it grows at a level of 9, the next year, an 8, the next year a 7. Lets also imagine we're going to go 3 years between repotting or potting up. Here's what happens to the tree you repot/root prune: year 1: 9 year 2: 8 year 3: 7 repot year 1: 9 year 2: 8 year 3: 7 repot year 1: 9 year 2: 8 year 3: 7 You can see that a full repotting and root pruning returns the plant to its full potential within the limits of other cultural influences for as long as you care to repot/root prune. Looking now at how woody plants respond to only potting up: year 1: 9 year 2: 8 year 3: 7 pot up year 1: 8 year 2: 7 year 3: 6 pot up year 1: 7 year 2: 6 year 3: 5 pot up year 1: 6 year 2: 5 year 3: 4 pot up year 1: 5 year 2: 4 year 3: 3 pot up year 1: 4 year 2: 3 year 3: 2 pot up year 1: 3 year 2: 2 year 3: 1 This is a fairly accurate illustration of the influence tight roots have on a woody plant's growth/vitality. You might think of it for a moment in the context of the longevity of bonsai trees vs the life expectancy of most trees grown as houseplants, the difference between 4 years and 400 years, lying primarily in how the roots are treated. I hope that was helpful. Al

I realize this thread is a week old but I wanted to offer my input. I think seysonn might be missing what mckenziek is asking. Mckenzies is asking how to figure out which zone is local when factoring in elevation (which zip code maps ignore to a large degree) of your specific location. For example: I live on top of a hill near Marysville, WA (98270 zip) at around 600 feet elevation. If I plug my zip code into a map tool, I usually get a hardiness zone of 7b. Now, I have 2 separate digital weather stations at my house with outside thermometers located at opposite ends of the property. I have watched (and actually logged) my daily temperatures and I know for a fact that if intellicast or one of the other weather forecast sites says a low of 38, my weather stations will almost always register a low several degrees lower (elevation) and likewise, my highs will often be a few degrees above the official airport weather station's measurement. This is probably due to a combination of elevation and other micro-climate effects. To answer Mckenziek's true question, there may be a broad brush calculator that figures out the local zone including the elevation but I seriously doubt it due to micro climates. I suggest getting a good thermometer or two and actually doing the measurements yourself for a year. If you do that, you'll be able to get a feel for the specific temperature extremes and you can use your localize annual low to determine the true zone number. You'll need to do this several years to get a decent sample size but you'll get a bit of an instinctive feel for it in the process.

rouge, I think the biggest difference lies in consecutive temperatures and duration. I see very hot temperatures in the NE on the news often which always surprise me but its usually more isolated and a much shorter duration. We fluctuate wildly here because of the gulf stream. When it moves, the north comes barreling down here like a freight train. Sometimes we get trapped in Heat Domes in summer which seems sort of like that Polar Vortex situation. You guys got the full brunt but we got grazed too, it was not near as bad as the northern parts. You must be affected by the lakes and the coast? I'm not familiar with all the weather factors up there. Right now we are freezing under the same system that is making you so cold. Next week we go back into the 50's 60's and even some 70's are forcast. edit: Just watched the news. Scratch that 70's forecast but we will certainly not complain, I'm sick of dry polar cold (teens & 20's) and day after day of cloudy and look forward to a week of bright sun and upper 50's and low 60's except tomorrow's snow was cancelled, we really need some moisture. The static electricity is terrible. I looked up windiest cities online. I was surprised at some of them. This post was edited by TexasRanger10 on Tue, Jan 13, 15 at 17:54

Blooming can get interrupted by cold temperatures. How long will depend on the weather. The plant may restart again in 2-4 weeks. Or if the timing of additional cold spells is right, it may take 1-2 months. For example, after a single drop into the low 20s, the shrub may take 2-4 weeks to restart blooming. But like I said before, one of my December-January blooming japonicas once got interrupted for 2 months and restarted blooming in mid March. During that 2 month period, we got several below freezing drops that stayed "on" for a while so I suspect that this prolonged drop made the shrub delay blooming more and more. Water deeply before these drops to prevent bud browning/drop. The color change may either be iron chlorosis or too much sun. When the tree canopy that provides shade looses all the leaves in the Fall/Winter, for example, they get more sun than normal and in mid-winter, I notice a tendency for the leaves to turn lighter green with bronze. If it appears to be chlorosis, amend the soil with a soil acidifier. I do not take action when bronzing due to the sun as the leaves turn darker green several weeks later, all on their own. Do not forget to water if the soil feels dry and it has not rained recently. Nice bloom in the middle picture!