Cold weather....
 

Maybe Connie and I should have moved further south. Like may to Costa Rica or something. The national weather service forecast is calling for a low of 18 degrees on Wednesday night here in north Florida. And a chance of frozen precipitation maybe tomorrow early.

Somebody tell me again, please, why so many people are against "global warming"? Unless it goes WAY over to the super hot side, seems to me that warmer overall temps would be beneficial for a whole lot more plants and animals all over the earth than cold weather ever is.

Got down to 21 to 23 degrees on the front porch last night, depending on which of my three thermometer sensors out there are accurate.

Some accounts calling for a low of 20 degrees on one hand tonight, but on the other hand maybe 25 degrees. I guess it shouldn't surprise me that the thermometers are just as inaccurate as the forecasts the people who make them use.

I'm so over it. I had a miserable trip to Ohio and back for New Years. Below zero up there. Now it's freezing here, too. I don't feel like doing anything after work, like grocery shopping. I've got some dog trials coming up, and last weekend in Clearwater it was FREEZING. Good thing I went to super extra effort and expense to get a nice room at St. Pete Beach, and it was so cold and grey and windy I never even went. Now I am looking forward to Rome, GA and North Carolina, and I'm sure it's going to be freezing there, too.

Yeah, I'm ready to give up on 2018 and head on back to 2017. Now where DID I put that time machine?

Did any of your citrus trees die? My son's orange and grapefruit lost many of their leaves and it wasn't as cold here.

Doesn't appear that we lost any of the trees, but we did have substantial leaf loss on the two older Meyer Lemon trees. Hopefully they will just bounce back with new leaves and set some fruit this year.

We have flowers budding on the peach trees, a couple of the little apple trees, and one of the pear trees already, so it appears they think it is Spring time. Hope a late freeze doesn't come through like it did last Spring and zap a bunch of flowers and newly formed fruit.

Interestingly enough, we don't have any flowers on the Japanese magnolias yet, and they are usually the first sign of impending Spring around here. Seen quite a few trees blooming in Tallahassee, however, so I guess ours are just taking their time.

What a blessing. To lose beautiful trees like that would have been devastating. We went to visit friends in Davenport and their neighbor had nice orange and grapefruit trees that produced every year. All of the trees were gone this year. I asked if it was hurricane damage or the cold weather, but my friend said his neighbor sold the house. The new buyer was a woman and she said the fruit trees attract armadillos, so she had them all cut down. What a shame.

So why the heck didn't she just trap the armadillos instead of cutting down producing fruit trees? :blowhead:

But thinking about it, I don't believe she is correct. Armadillos are insect and grub feeders, not fruit feeders. I hate trapping them myself to move them out of here (they are digging underneath the steps, the shed, and once toppled over the propane tank for my generator) because they seem to love tearing up fire ant mounds.

Now possums? Yeah, they are always getting into our fruit trees. Matter of fact, they ate all the asian pears this year and most of the other pears we had. So I need to do something about them for next season. Maybe put aluminum flashing around the bases of the trees so they can't climb up into them to get to the fruit.

Anyway, regardless of the varmints causing headaches, I'll tell you, it is an absolute joy to be able to take a walk on your own property and pull off fruit to eat from your own fruit trees while taking that walk. Of course, the down side to that is that we really can't eat "store bought" tangerines any longer, since they don't taste nearly as good as the stuff we grow. And we laugh at those pitiful looking lemons at the grocery store. It would take about three of them to equal one of Connie's from her trees.

Uninformed people make bad decisions. Had she asked my friend for advice he would have helped to relocate the armadillos. Her hired crew cut all the trees down quickly. I had a lot of acreage in Michigan and had planted peach, apple, pears, berries, and grapes. We loved walking daily down to our big pond and eating whatever was in season. If we had more fruit than we could eat I called the local neighbors to harvest what they wanted. Made a lot of good friends.