January 2017 freeze

In Houston, one never knows if there will be a winter freeze, and I am one to take my chances and plant as if there will not be one. Overnight between January 6 and 7, 2017, and again from January 7 to January 8, the temperature went below 25 degrees and damaged or destroyed some of my garden plants.

At 10:30 in the morning of January 7, the birth baths were still completely frozen.

Click the photo to see it bigger!

On the 8th, the young fava bean stalks were lying flat on the ground...

...and the snap pea plants were limp and frosted. 

All of my brassicas were discolored, frosted and nearly flattened. The broccoli at the southern end of Bed 2 eventually recovered and produced large flower heads.

The winter kale survived after I removed a lot of its leaves, but others were not worth trying to save.

The tatsoi plants were withered and frosted on the lower leaves.  At first I tried to keep the upper leaves, which didn't look quite as bad, but I ended up throwing both of the plants in the compost.

All of the bok choy was ruined, turning translucent. Lettuces,  aliums (onion, garlic, leeks, etc.) and carrot family plants (carrots, dill, parsley, fennel) had little damage.

The arugula was a bit the worse for wear, but it pulled through.

Forget about the fall tomatoes! I waited a few days to see if they might improve, but they just looked even more dead.

Some green tomatoes still looked okay. I thought I might cook some, but upon biting into one, I found that they tasted horrible.

Dramatically, the ice inside all my basil plants expanded and split the stems apart.

My patch of sweet potato spinach, which generally spreads very aggressively, frosted and flattened.

Within a few days, it looked kind of like an oil slick, but the the plants regrew from their roots and eventually looked like nothing ever happened.

The biggest tragedy came with the rapid demise of my papaya trees. After the first day of the freeze, the two trees against the back wall already looked unrecoverable, which turned out to be true.

In case there was any doubt, within ten days both of the trees, and most of their fruits, were covered with black mold.

The final blow was my Meyer lemon tree, which was coming off a pretty productive year. The first sign of damage was that all of the tree's leaves were curled into little tubes.

Eventually all the moisture left the tree's limbs, and they became rigid and easy to break. I removed the dead tree within a month.

Finally, and not that it matters so much, the two Aloe vera plants I had in pots on my patio went limp after the freeze. At first glance they looked okay, but the leaves were soft inside, and they couldn't hold themselves up. The Aloe vera went to the compost pile.