If it's in a fully enclosed porch, that helps. If it's warmer in there during the day, that helps. But it can also help if you get yourself some bubble wrap and wrap the pot a few times. It's kind of the easiest and fastest ways to get a little extra insulation on a pot in the porch if you can't do more serious stuff. If the pot is small enough to fit in a cooler, that works well too- think of the styrofoam caps folks sometimes use on rose bushes to overwinter. If you get box food delivery service that has insulation in the box, that insulation works well too. Yes, you should water. But not a lot. You don't want the dirt to go bone dry, but you don't want it wet either. The plants are dormant and so don't really need water themselves, but the dirt still should be a bit moist. And pots seem to want to stay damp longer when it's cold out so you might not need to water much at all depending.

I think Dan summed up my thoughts best in his first post. I don't agree with the dismissiveness regarding cabling expressed in some of the other responses. Based on the info provided, cabling probably won't be the best answer, but I also wouldn't completely eliminate it from the possibilities without more info. In some situations, proper cabling can be a great long-term solution to an otherwise serious problem. _____________________________________ _____________________________________ One of the easiest ways to provide your photo to be embedded into a post is to upload it onto an image hosting site such as Photobucket, Flickr, etc. That should be pretty straight forward, and the individual sites will give instructions on how to get your photos uploaded to their site when you sign up. Once your picture has been uploaded, find its image location address (URL) by right clicking on the image and copying the image location. Some sites may even provide the appropriate HTML code in a text box below the photo for your convenience. It will be the one that begins with a href=... Let's say, as an example, that the address of the picture you want to post is http://somepicturesite.com/yourpicture.jpg To embed the picture into a post, use the command: img src="http://somepicturesite.com/yourpicture.jpg"> _____________________________________ If your picture is too large to fit nicely into the text page, you can add a width attribute. The command with the width attribute would look something like: img src="http://somepicturesite.com/yourpicture.jpg" width=600> _____________________________________ Another option is to use a text link which might be beneficial to people on slow connections. To do this, use the command: a href="http://somepicturesite.com/yourpicture.jpg">your text goes here/a> _____________________________________ Note that I had to use special characters to get the commands above to show up here without turning into pictures, but you can use them as shown (with the correct image web address, of course).

This is my experience: not having any live oaks on my property, I collect between a hundred and a hundred and fifty bags of oak leaves from the curbsides of my neighbors every year about this time. Most of them I put on the beds for mulch. I stack about twenty or thirty bags along the back fence out of sight for use throughout the rest of the year because in the beds they decompose into almost nothing by late summer, especially if we get some rain. If the bags don't have a lot of grass clippings in them (I don't pick up those since they are too heavy) they don't produce an odor and are preserved in the bags just as they were when collected. If I stick holes in the bags to let rain in, or the leaves were raked when moist, they start to decompose into sweet smelling compost without producing an odor. I used to have lawn guys that would dump leaves directly into my compost pile, which was constructed of a half circle of wire held away from the chain link fence by rebars pounded into the ground. With nothing added, no greens or anything, they composted down to very little well within a year; or in a few months if it rained. (In the old days when water was inexpensive I would wet them down.) I would just keep pulling the good stuff out from the bottom and just keep adding to the top. I don't know why most everyone couldn't just make a area in an out of the way place to pile the leaves and let nature take its course. Love those oak leaves! :-)

if you are going to split it by hand, you definitely want to do it now while it is still "green". oak gets hard when it dries and will give you a workout if you don't have the proper tools and knowledge to use them! if you use a hydraulic splitter, you can split them later, but it will delay the drying. i have used oak after 1 year of seasoning, but it burns MUCH better the 2nd year.