As some of you know while I was in Florida my GFI tripped leaving my washies exposed to 12 days with no heat, along with everything else. Of course this had to happen during the coldest night this winter 4f, followed by three more nights in the low to mid teens. So how many hours where they below freezing? My guess is at least 120 hours, not really a good thing for a washy. I believe they saw a low of 10-12f good thing they where dry or they would be dead for sure!
The two in the back yard actually handled the cold much better only burning about 40% or so.
So I decided to build them a greenhouse to get them pushing out leaves before they come out totally. I thinking I might leave the front one in there until the first of may since it's 100% defoliated, this way I'll get much better growth since April is wet and sometimes crappy here anyways. So here's what I got.
Pictures of the leaves before I chopped them off. They where a little green but totally crispy so I chopped them, Why Not the tree already sucked everything it could from them. If not they just would have pissed me off every time I looked at them, I left the stems which were still green. As you can see from the fourth picture the spear is green and healthy, I have the spear measured so I can monitor it's growth in the weeks to come.
After going through all this effort building this giant ugly box (had all the parts) I figured why not load it up with other stuff it is a pretty good green house.
So I put 5 sabal palmettos, 5 sabal minors, 1 phoenix Sylvester, and 3 agaves in there. Might as well get them geared up for summer too I'm sure they'll like it in there better then the basement greenhouse, which is working very well.
Here it is all closed up
Since it's on the south side of my house and receives sun all day it gets really hot in there, by noon when it's 44f outside it was 102f so I need to add a exhaust fan which is no big deal I have all those parts too, I have it come on in the low 90's, that should get it growing. I did give it a health shot of dyna gro with about six gallons of water, It looked thirsty, the heat cables are keeping the ground warm enough to absorb it too. So there's my last crazy idea.
Any guesses on how many fronds it will make by may 1st?
Thanks for looking,
Bill
!
I feel for the washy but it´s a big strong tree so hopefully it recovers well. BTW in what zone are you?
