hi btbeme, you must live down the road from me. i also live in the outskirts of chandler (cooper and riggs) and it froze pretty hard here last night/early this morning. so i share your pain. our fountain was, and still is as i write this, filled with ice cycles! all my sisso trees were hit hard. the smallest one had a heat lamp on it last night, and it still suffered some damage. the others are too big to cover and almost all the leaves are browning. my ficus seems to have done ok, it is larger and it looks like only the leaves on the tops got some damage. i remember a hard freeze like this about 3 years ago. the ficus got a lot of damage during that freeze, along with some other plants in the yard, but they eventually recovered. just be patient and don't remove any of the damaged limbs until the weather warms up in spring. by then, you should be able to see new growth as well. i would go ahead and still cover any plants that you can again for tonight and keep your fingers crossed. i don't think that it is going to be as cold tonight as it was last night, but it still will be cold. good luck.

One thing I've seen in my yard is that if you can drape a massively huge plastic tarp up and over bushes and small trees and extend the tarp out in all directions across the ground it will concentrate the heat coming up from the ground. It may not be enough to keep things above freezing but it does seem to help. It is also a lot easier to just drag and drape than to wrap and manage each and every plant in the flower bed. I also rig up a temporary hoop house with pvc pipe and plastic sheeting from the home improvement store and set a small kerosene heater in it. Kerosene is an easy fuel to work with, costs about $3.50 per gallon around here (NC). My small heater will run for around 13 hours on one gallon. The trouble is finding a small kerosene heater, everyone sells the large ones which over heat and burn a lot of fuel.

We hit a low of 28 last night and it will be days before I find out what damage was done. Other than the blooms on the peach tree I also had lots of new growth on the roses so I will have to see how they fared too. I have frost on the vehicles and the birdbaths are frozen solid so I know it stayed too cold for too long not to have had some additional damage. But the greenhouse stayed at 50 so everything in there is safe. Lots of cuttings rooted for spring replacements and swaps. sharbear-I brought the lily in the house to enjoy so the background is actually dark green curtains it is sitting in front of. ill-man-Maybe I'll come to your house for some peaches! Ha-Ha! Katkin and Felix-Hi guys! It is good to hear from old friends! COME ON SPRING! nova

Wait a year. I'm in Deltona. I have a FlordaPrince obtained from Home Depot. Planted it when dormant two years ago (this will be its third season). This is the first year any blooms set fruit. Conversely, I have a UFO peach that has been in the ground less than a year that is producing. Similarly, I have another peach tree that is approaching its second season and I had to thin like crazy to have big peaches in its first year and this year. I ordered a "Tropic Snow" from the nursery but it's not that because the flesh isn't white. I think it's a "Tropic Beauty" sent by mistake, but it really is a beauty. The flowers are showy and production is outstanding. Anyway, I think the FlordaPrince just needs a few seasons to get going. One thing that's important to note, YOU MUST ACTIVELY CARE FOR PEACH TREES. They need lots of water, they're very hungry, they need to be pruned at least annually in a very specific way, and the fruit needs to be thinned when they produce. They are NOT care-free trees. You WILL get disease and insect pressure if you don't care for them. This post was edited by TheTradition on Fri, Mar 21, 14 at 19:15