Is that a big bottle, or can we give you one of those airline bottles?

Ricky,
I hope you are right. Does that applies for me also. Please
say it does.

Ricky,
30--40 years ago you comment would have been scoffed at.

But there is so much dam concrete now in the tri county area .............you are probably right.

Hi
Oh sure your going to make it stop frosting after I put a heating system in the shadehouse.!!! I never even got to test it last year so still have no idea how well it will work lol I was hoping for a hard freeze!!!
Since your predicting , When will this eternal drought end?? is it never going to return to "normal"?gary

gary - I don't call the rain, just the temps.

everyone else - Appropriate whisky can be found here. Thanks in advance. :o)

What are you saying? We're going to have global warming? Never heard of it.

I'm going out on a limb here (before I trim it).
In all my years of gardening here, whenever I've seen a very mild fall/early winter there have been severe cold blasts later on with frost and freezes in my part of zone 10 (northern Palm Beach County). This year seems to be one of those years.
Of course I hope I'm wrong.
Maybe I just want to jump in on the "whisky wager"!

Greetings Gardening Gurus:

What are the advantages of pruning sooner rather than later...say February? I have a jatropha (about 8' tall) that has grown "leggy & lopsided" and desperately needs an "arborcure". I've see the City of WPB chop these down to sticks as hedges but can't remember when. I suppose if you guess wrong and prune too early, then a cold snap comes and wilts the new growth, it might be hard on a plant but what's the down-side of waiting? As a certified procrastinator, I sometimes find nature rewards a lack of action but if I understand the risks I can sometimes be moved to appropriate action.

This is a very timely topic for me. Thanks, Ricky. By the way, the plants I got at your swap are doing super! Y'all GWers are wonderful and you deserve a bit of a dram.

Julie in WPB (a die-hard bourbon girl--yeehaw)

Hi
Was looking through records for W Palm and was rather surprised at the figures. At some year it has frosted on every day in Dec.Jan> Feb. Latest on March 3 1980 30 low.
Coldest I could find among the records was 27
Temps were recorded at PBIA though one Jan 3,1898 31
Obviously not at the airport?? lol
Only place in Florida it has never frosted is Key West
Low was 41 degrees.
They did not record the lowest daytime highs. but I seem to remember some low 50's??
You can find that site at Weather.com gary

WELLLLLLLLLL,

One year in 1961 or 1962 we had frost Easter morning . This was in Broward .
I worried ALL NIGHT for the Easter bunny................
and all the grown ups were talking about how they couldn't`t believe we got frost so late in the winter.

Weather can be freaky ! Thanks for the website Gary :)

If everyone who doesn't like cool weather gets together and sends it my way (Jupiter) I'll be thrilled!! My poor low-chill fruit trees have been deprived of chill hours for years.

I love weather under 60. It makes me frisky(G). I did protect my croton standards with frost bags on Sunday night. Last year I lost one to a similar chilly night.

If anyone needs frost blankets, Frostproof.com has ones big enough to cover a Jakfruit tree. I ordered Sunday night, got my boxful today!

MegaGro.com has smaller sizes, super easy to use and very secure against wind/cold. Those I used on the Crotons. It took 5 minutes.

Much easier than blankets/sheets.

Lisa

Here is a link that might be useful: Frost covers

This is not a facetious question. I've only been here 3 years. Gary and all, what do you mean by fall and winter?
Thanks,
Lynne

Fall is the season that starts when the humidity finally breaks at the end of the summer.

Winter is when the cold fronts slide through and you go looking for the box of sweaters and jeans in the storage closet.

Hi
I go by the calandar after all we're a long way from the equator. Even if the weather stays warm we still lose a lot of sunlight. There is a distict shift in the growth level even among wild plants. No dramatic changes as in the north
but very distinct all the same.
In tropical regions they call "winter' when they have less rainfall.
I like to think of Oct' as "spring" time to start new projects July as "winter" not because it's too cold but too damn hot to do anything. lol gary

Hey Gary:

That is the perfect way to think of the seasons here. My dad was a labor market analyst and he said the formulae they used for the north were backwards for south Florida because our employment was higher in the winter. If we think of our "winter" as the time you don't want to be out working in the garden, then July and August are the perfect representations. Garden philosophy is all about adapting to our environment and, Gary, you sound like you've adapted brilliantly. (Or were you born here?)

Julie in WPB

Thanks for the clarifications.

Julie
grew up in a small town in SW Kansas but have lived in 10 for almost 30 years. I never really tried to "garden"
even here, until after 2000. When you think about it the only difference between here and other zones is duration.
It gets too cold too hot too wet too dry just like everywhere else just doesn't last as long.lol
Isn't it funny how ingrained how behaviour is to the calendar rather than the actual weather lol. There really are distict seasions here jus out of whack lol gary

No trimming for me. Here on the edge of zone 8 I will not trim until the last frost had past. A few years ago that was on April 1. Times like that I wish I had landed 20 years ago in zone 10 but being a dumb Northerners we didn't know any better. So stayed here since we had friends that liked it here. Now we do as it is kinda rural.

Well, yesterday afternoon was cleanup here in the garden. Thankfully, very little damage has taken place. Two palm fronds from a Bismarck that got some tip damage, but everything else was normal weekly trimming.

The Tipuana dropped enough leaves to cover the pinebark mulch and the Bulnesia is following suit. These two lose foliage every time we drop below 60, so that's expected. Every other tree is fine.

I'm sticking with my forecast of 3 more cold shots this winter and I'll be happy if that number is too high.

Happy New Year to all our GardenWeb friends. See you in May.