Several years back, a friend & fellow oak enthusiast did an experiment freezing several hundred Q.alba acorns in a solid block of ice and holding them overwinter in that manner - none survived as viable seeds that germinated. Don't know if that will extrapolate to seeds frozen in a persimmon or not.

It was 24 at my house in Sacramento on Monday night, and about 26 last night (Tues). The soil in my gallon pots was pretty well frozen this morning. So was the water in my fountain! Even at noon, its water was about like a Slurpee. One of my clay pots split - I think it already had a crack, which filled with water. We are supposed to be a bit warmer tonight - perhaps 30 degrees. We now only have three days of rain in our near-term forecast. I hate to miss work days in the cemetery, but the roses need water more than they need to be pruned! Debbie, my bet is that your bands will come back from the roots, but it's hard to tell. Definitely, potting up smaller plants to protect the roots is a good idea, and putting them under shelter. I honestly don't think that you need to move the really big pots, although I'm sure that your husband will like the bottle of wine. 28 degrees is considered a "hard freeze." We usually get that cold just a few times in the winter, and occasionally don't get below 30. I wonder if we have an especially cold winter ahead. It will be good for the once-bloomers! Anita

OK, if there's one thing I've spent a lot of time doing it's treating books for problems, including the dreaded mildew. One thing that I know is freezing does nothing for mildew. If it did the books I am currently bringing in from dry, but below 0F storage would be in tip top shape, and it just ain't so, alas. There is some research that shows that many of the environmental things that we do to try and treat a mold infestation can actually prod resting spores to come alive and get busy. Fungi have been with us forever, and I believe they will outlast us. But here's what you can do for books with some mildew issues. First, you have to accept that bringing books with mildew into your house will put all your other books at somewhat higher risk. It's a trade-ff, and a difficult one to make. Some people won't have it; some people quarantine the mildewed ones, permanently. My choice is to do what I can to clean them very well and then accept that I will have to monitor not only them but all the others and proactively manage my indoor environment as best I can, forever. Here's how to get them cleaned up: Mildew suppression and removal can be considered something of an emergency, so if you are going to do something about it, it must be started at once. (When I have had to deal with an outbreak, all other household work stops, and DH resigns himself to sandwiches until it's done. It can be hard, intense work if you have a big problem.) First, they must have the humidity lowered before being cleaned in order to avoid rubbing the active mildew colonies into the crevices on the surfaces. This is most easily done using a dehumidifier in a detached, closed room. (The dehu will have to thoroughly cleaned afterward.) Lowering the humidity to 40% would be a good target if you can do it in a day or so. Next best for drying the books is out of doors on a dry, breezy day away from your house and open windows to your house. Fast changes in humidity are hard on books and can create problems of their own, but mildew removal is the first, most urgent, concern. After the books are dry, or at least surface dry, take barely damp, cut-up squares of paper towels and brushing in only one direction (away from your face and away from the spine), lightly brush the mildew or efflorences off. The purpose of this step is to do a quick removal of the gross contamination and arrest any further development. Be prepared to use a lot of towels and try not to wipe "cleaner areas" with a soiled section. Another way to do this is to vacuum the books with a clean upholstery brush, BUT, this has the potential to seriously contaminate your vacuum and then spew book-mildew spores out every time you use it ever afterward. I have solved this by having a special, dedicated, true-HEPA museum vacuum that I only use on books, and can disassemble completely for cleaning. I live with nearly 7,000 books so it's an important cleaning tool for me, but probably not so important for others. Simple hand wiping, however, will do as good a job, and leave your vacuum safe. If you do use a vac, you will need to use it carefully to avoid damaging the books or sucking loose pieces of pages or the dust jackets in. (BTW, remove any dust jackets and treat them separately.) It's also a good idea to wash any brushes and dry them completely between days of work, if it extends over more than one day. But you're not done now. You still need to expose the books to sunlight for a few hours. Of course sunlight can fade bindings, so this has to be controlled carefully. But a few hours of good strong sun will do wonders to kill many of the remaining spores that you can't see. After the sunbath, and still working outside on trestle tables covered with clean sheets, I go on to the next phase of the cleaning. What I do next is to wipe the covers down with grain alcohol, which will kill even more of the remaining spores, without in my experience, doing much or any damage. Obviously, each book has to be carefully tested to make sure the alcohol won't damage the covers, but I rarely find it does. I know some people have used isopropyl (rubbing alcohol), but I've had many more bleeding and damage problems with that than with grain alcohol. I get grain alcohol (which is not for consumer sale in NY), by going across state lines and purchasing it from Vermont State Liquor Stores. (I have been told that in some states in can be bought in ordinary liquor stores or in pharmacies.) Even there it has become more difficult to get because it is so damaging to drink. I have to sign a statement that I am using it for scientific or experimental purposes; I just state I am using it to clean books. I got the idea of using the grain alcohol from studying both the solinet and palimpsest preservation boards. They suggested using cut-up squares of paper towels saturated in grain alcohol and kept in zip-lock bags. My process is to slice a roll of Select-a-size Bounty in half or thirds and then use the pieces. I have a small container with a siphoning laboratory top that allows me to just tap and draw up the alcohol. I wipe the entire cover surface (from spine to edge) discarding the little towels as soon as they look dirty. (I wind up standing in a little snow storm of squares of discarded towel if I'm doing a big project outdoors. The alcohol-saturated towels must be thoroughly air-dried before being discarded in the trash can in order to avoid spontaneous combustion, so I just drop them to the ground and then collect them in batches.) After I've done the spine and covers, I open the book and do the turn-over of the cover, and sometimes the end paper and free fly leaf in the gutter. Then I stand the book upright on a clean surface to air and finish drying while I go on to the next one. I work carefully so that I am cleaning and dusting down wind, and have a freshly sheeted table upwind for the ones that have been wiped. It's not the same as a hospital operating field, but the principle is the same: pick-up from table with "dirty" books, clean in the air holding the book , then set it down on the clean surface. After the first table has been done, I pack the books loosely in clean liquor boxes and bring them indoors to a room where I continue to dehu them down to very, very, dry. I keep the clean liquor boxes shut-up away from the cleaning operation until needed so as not to be putting cleaned books in boxes that have been exposed to air-borne spores disturbed in the wiping operations. I make sure to wash my hands and change clothes before handling the cleaned books. The purpose of this multi-step process (drying, physical removal, UV exposure, and alcohol wiping) is to use a series of suppressant techniques to increase the effectiveness of the "kill", kind of like using a broad-spectrum antibiotic when you're sick. You want to demoralize as many different resistant beasties as you can. It is a lot of work, but when the other option is to discard the books, I prefer it. After your books are clean, and have had additional drying then I would re-inspect and see if they seem OK for being shelved with the others. If in doubt keep them separate for a season and see how they do. But having had a mildew problem you are now more or less obliged to keep indoor humidity under rigid control forever more. If you don't, you risk the problem coming back, and worse, further extending itself. Pay attention to places within your house that are relatively more or less affected by increased ambient humidity and make decisions about where to store books based on those factors. I keep my most valuable books stored on the second floor because it stays dryer during the hot summer months. I have a couple of dozen of those small max-min hygrometers and I check on them every day to monitor conditions. I do not have a/c, which would make this problem much less onerous. As for the various book-eating and book-burrowing pests, freezing might destroy them and if I found an active infestation, that would be my first choice. Being in a freezer with food would hard on books, however. Perhaps you could ship them up to Gloria and she could expose them Alaska's natural freezing? Finally make sure you can tell the difference between mildew and foxing on old books. While there are many theories about the origin of foxing, and it is exacerbated by excess humidity, it is not the same as mildew, nor would it be improved by sunning and alcohol wipes. It would be a shame to go to all this trouble in a vain attempt to eliminate foxing, which is more or less permanent on books. Are you dealing with any leather-bound books (partially or fully), the process has some similarities, and they have the same, or increased, risk of mildew, but the cleaning procedure and treatment are different. I hope I have given you some useful suggestions. I have never had any "chemical" concerns using grain alcohol, which after all, is considered "potable" in some states. One would of course not want to breathe too much of it in a closed room, nor smoke while using it! Long-term control of mildew on books is affected by decreasing humidity, avoiding stagnant air (say shelves behind a sofa), avoiding darkness (though this is a two-edged sword due to the risk of fading) and eliminating mold food. Of course molds adore paper pulp and starches (AKA pages and covers), but mold can be somewhat discouraged by keeping the books well-dusted and free from the organic residues often found in a house (soot, grease, smoke, spider droppings,etc.) I regularly go over my books - well actually more or less constantly since I have so many it takes months to clean each one, once. For some reason well-dusted books seem have fewer problems, or maybe I'm just cleaning it off in an earlier, less visible, stage. Either way, I find scrupulous cleaning keeps me from having to deal with outbreaks. So when you are done putting down the mildew-attack, consider going over all the books, page by page to get them completely in good order. There is nothing more satisfying than a clean, sweet-smelling old book. And speaking of sweet-smelling, even books "cured" of mildew may have a lingering, musty odor problem. I can add some additional info if that's an issue for you, though the airing and sunning will make a big difference all by itself. I can also make some suggestions for books about cleaning and managing a library, if you'd like. As you may have gathered, I have faced this problem more than few times. I have had good success with these techniques and hope you will, too. Molly~

Oh, Kathy... Oh boy, can I relate! (Last May 23rd). The things we do for our beloved hostas. Your reward will be gorgeous, unmarked hostas that you can enjoy for the rest of the season. Were you able to enlist the help of your grandsons at all in the "covert-cover op"? ;-) We are expecting a bit more snow today, followed by rain but it is still unseasonably c*o*l*d brrrr. Then next week we are in double digits for most of the week, lots of sunshine, high teen temps for next weekend, such a welcome finally. Woo Hoo!