Plan now to minimize the garden damage from North Texas winter cold spells

There’s never a way to know what lies ahead when winter begins here in Texas. We are, after all, a land where extremes rule. We seem to take pride in how quickly our weather can change, yet it’s our plants that are left out to suffer. Just look at what’s happened in the cold spells of February 2021 and December 2022.

Let’s assume some calamity like that might avalanche its way into North Texas sometime this winter. What could we be doing now to minimize the damage? I’m going to list the critical facts that have come to my mind.

▪ Remove dead and damaged branches from shade trees immediately. These will snap with the first ice or wind storm, and you’d be amazed at how heavy they are. They can do thousands of dollars of damage and cause serious injuries and worse. Suggestion: hire a certified arborist to do this work for you. That person has the right equipment, experience and insurance.

▪ Buy frost cloth and cut it to fit over all your vulnerable plants. Make it long enough to come down to the ground. Have bricks or river rocks concealed out of sight and ready to use as ballasts to hold the cloth in place against winds.

Once you have that done, fold the cloth neatly and place it inside trash bags with well-marked labels. Store it out of the way in the garage or tool shed. It can be kept for years until you need it. It can even be reused.

▪ Check the sprinkler system to be sure it’s all working properly and make any necessary repairs and adjustments. It’s much more pleasant to do so now than it will be at 38 degrees before a hard freeze. Be certain, too, that you know how to turn all of the water lines off in an emergency. You don’t want to have to find out in the middle of a freezing night.

▪ As late as we are in the growing season, don’t tempt fate by planting tender plants now. That would include St. Augustine sod, and it would include Zone 8 shrubs such as gardenias, oleanders, Japanese yews and pittosporums. You really shouldn’t be planting many of those anyway, but if you insist, save those plantings for spring so they can have most of a year to establish before they hit winter. For the rest of our shrubs and trees, however, this is a great time for planting.

▪ Tidy your perennial gardens and shrub beds, then mulch them carefully. You can use finely ground bark mulch, or shredded tree leaves you have picked up off the lawn this fall and run through the mower. Mulches make it much more difficult for weeds to germinate, but the important thing in this discussion is that they moderate the rate of soil temperature change so that your plants’ roots don’t freeze and thaw rapidly. That’s a great source of cold-weather injury. Just a couple of inches of mulch can offer a lot of good winter protection as it covers the ground.

▪ Build yourself a greenhouse. (I thought I’d just throw that one in to give you a nudge.) This is one of the most exciting aspects of home hobby gardening. It lets you garden when cold weather prevents it otherwise.

Tips on building: It doesn’t have to be elaborate or expensive. It can even be a lean-to against a wall of your house or garage. Kits are available, or you can design your own. If possible, go with at least a 10-by-20 foot size. Smaller greenhouses overheat rapidly on sunny, cold days, and it’s difficult to keep up with the fluctuations in temperatures, so go as large as you can.

Have sturdy benches and set your most shade-tolerant plants beneath them. Hanging baskets can go overhead if the structure will support them.

Have a back-up heat source that doesn’t require electricity should the power go out, or at least have a generator to operate the blowers within the gas heater. Provide some type of shade fabric if you’re growing plants that need that protection. I leave 62% shade on my greenhouse year ‘round.

▪ Back outdoors, when hard freezes are expected, disconnect all hoses from exposed faucets and drain the hoses and sprinklers so that water won’t expand and rupture the functioning parts within the spray heads.

▪ Put out your bird feeders and fill them with several types of feed. You’ll have all types of birds in your neighborhood, from small songbirds that favor oil-type sunflower seeds to woodpeckers dining on various seeds and dried meal worms, also fast-moving blue jays pulling out in-shell peanuts on the fly. It’s an avian circus out there, and it’s well worth the price of admission.

▪ As the winter unfolds, keep an eye on the 10-day forecast. Our coldest weather typically comes in January and early February, but in our 50-plus years of living around the Metroplex, I’ve seen more damage done by very early freezes before plants became “hardened” or very late freezes once plants had started gearing up to grow. February 2021 was the ultimate example of the latter, and last year — the Christmas cold spell — was a good example of the former.

Hey! It’s Texas. You just never really know!