Protect Your Plants

Before the Freeze

 Cover your Plants
 Use non-plastic covering. Frost cloths can be found at hardware stores and garden centers, alternatives can be large blankets, bedsheets, or burlap.
 Do not “lollipop” young trees, essentially covering the leaves and branches and tying it off at the upper trunk.
 The covering should drape over the plant and reach the ground and anchored with bricks or other weights to hold the covering to the ground.
 Place mulches around perennials to protect the roots and trap soil heat.
 For palm trees, the most important part to protect is the young spear leaf that comes from the center of the palm. wrap the palm leaves together and wrap in frost cloth. For more on cold weather and palms see Cold Damage on Palms EDIS publication.

Irrigation
 Watering just before the cold front will actually help protect your plants. Wet soil will absorb more heat during the day and radiate it during the night.
 Container Gardens
 If you have container gardens, it is best to relocate them to somewhere sheltered. Inside a garage, lanai, or along fences, buildings, temporary coverings, and adjacent plantings that can all serve as windbreaks and protect plants from cold winds.

Raised Beds
If you have raised garden beds, you can lay your frost cloth over your garden beds and secure them with bricks or other heavy material. A more advanced method of frost protection is creating floating row covers using wire support hoops. This is a commercial agriculture technique that can be implemented in the home garden with a bit of work.

After the Freeze

 Watering
Watering your plants after a freeze will help thaw the soil if frozen and provides water to your plants that may be lost due to transpiration.
 Pruning
 
 Freeze damaged plants.
 Leaves that are dying and turning brown can be pruned. Be careful not to remove any live branches or over-prune the plant. If the plant needs severe pruning, wait until after new growth appears.
 
 Cold Injury
 Some cold injury isn’t immediate or obvious. Some cold damage symptoms are a lack of spring bud break leading to reduced fruit quantity. Additional damage could appear in discolorations, overall weak appearance, and more.