With a hard freeze coming tomorrow night lots of people are worried about how to protect their plants. LSU Ag center horticulturist Heather Kirk- Ballard said if the plants are in containers, you should move them, but they don’t all have to come all the way inside.
“If you happen to have anything in containers that are tropical, go ahead and move them to a patio, you can wrap them in Christmas lights actually and that will raise the temperature,” she said and added that it is important to use only outdoor lights and extension cords.
She said if you do decide to move your plants indoors, cut back on the watering to only about once a week or when the plants start to wilt slightly. She said water is a good insulator for plants that are in the ground, so if the soil is dry, they should be watered thoroughly before a freeze.
She said plants that are in the ground and trees younger than five years old can be saved by wrapping them, but you need to do it the right way.
“You want to trap that radiant heat, so make sure it’s covered all the way down to the ground and do that during the day, you don’t want to do it at night time, grab that radiant heat from the ground and it will trap it underneath those sheets,” she said.
Kirk-Ballard recommends creating a simple structure to hold coverings off of the foliage, and she said it is important to seal covers with soil, stones or bricks.
She adds that a surprising number of plants will bounce back in the spring.
“It’s typically just our tropical plants and our sub-tropical plants that we worry about but everything else, yeah it’s going to look a little fried but in the springtime it’s going to bounce right back,” Kirk-Ballard said.
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