Why my living room looks like a makeshift greenhouse.

Like many California gardeners I have transformed the inside of my house into a temporary greenhouse. What about you? I hope to take them out tomarrow.

Me too. Ordered some 10 plants last week, they are all sitting in my dining room, together with the cucumber seeds and bell pepper seeds that are germinating.
Silly sight, but maybe DH will ask Santa to bring me a greenhouse next year! LOL

Me three! Here's a pic of my setup with shelves and lights to keep all my various succulents safe from the frost and rain. When i set this up two months ago, I had NO idea of course how bad the temps would get here in San Diego! All the plants seem to be doing quite well this way...many are blooming and getting really tall and sprouting new leaves and shoots!

kim

IslandGurl, in my next life, can I come back as one of your succulents, please??? They look SPOILED, and I would like to be spoiled too....;-)

Christie

Hehehee...sure Christie...I'll make a spot for ya ;-)


kim

Hi. I live in zone 10b west Valley ( Calabasas Ca), and we never had a winter this cold, I had 600 succulents and cacti, and many tropicals plans, so we have had some days with temperatures in the 20 F So all my plants are or seems dead, I do not know what to do. end their missery (and my) or wiat until spring. If some one up there have a solucion please help. I took the usual precaution same as every winter but this is a first in this area and my garden is all gone,

I wouldn't give up on anything yet--some things probably won't come back, but I know some of them will surprise you and come back to life in the spring. Some of them may be very slow to come back--it's up to you how long you want to wait, but for example one year I had a Caesalpinia pulcherrima that I planted in the ground, it got hit pretty bad by frost and all the leaves fell off, fortunately I was a lazy gardener and hadn't gotten around to pulling out what what I thought was a dead plant, and then in August when I finally got around to cleaning up that part of the garden, I noticed that it had just started some new growth (most things will come back faster than that though!) I would definitely wait until spring, then cut back any dead branches (don't cut them back now or else you risk stimulating new growth that'll get damaged if we have another cold snap). The only thing I would do is now if there are mushy leaves that are starting to rot I would get rid of those so that you don't end up with a mold infestation. For the cacti/succulents I can't offer any advice on what to do (or not) with them right now, my advice is more for your tropicals and other plants. I would think the same thing goes though, leave them alone and see what happens in the spring.