Too bad you can't find some old heaters from some old groves.

It started out at 62 at 530 am and it is 45 now.

Connie and I just got back in from laying out the sheets and tarps where we are going to be covering citrus in a little bit. Things should go quicker this way. Kind of windy, so I hope that dies down a bit and doesn't just blow the tarps off.

Going to be a rough week with the temps, it seems. But at least the daytime temps are going to be coming up out of freezing, so that should help a bit.

43f here now. I don't see anything getting below 34 for my area. Greening sickness took care of every citrus tree in my hood starting back in 05. I had the best oranges and it started to die from the top down in 05 and every other tree in the hood is long gone. I tried to grow another tree in 08 and it died. So i am done with citrus.

I'm hoping we can avoid that disease on our citrus. Probably the safest thing for us to do would be to consider our trees a closed system and just not buy anything else that could bring in a problem. I think after this, we are leaning in that direction anyway. Pretty much ties us down in the winter months because we have to hang around here in case there is a cold snap like this that we would need to be available to cover some stuff. We even through a tarp over the water pump tank this time, which we have never done in the past.

But if the "global warming" starts bringing in cold spells like this every year, might just be a moot issue.

We just got back in from covering the trees we had tarps for. Probably should run by Harbor Freight and buy a few more, but quite likely they are sold out locally anyway. We could have used one more for one of the small satsumas, but they are supposed to be really cold hardy, so one of the three is going to be an involuntary test case this week, I guess.

Temp is 40 degrees on our front porch right now. After Connie and I take showers, I will be running out to drip the pipes before the temp drops below freezing.

I am DEFINITELY hoping the weather goombas are WAY wrong on the forecast on the low temps. But hoping it will be warmer than predicted, of course, not the other way.

BTW, one interesting way I have discovered to determine that a cold night is heading our way is that spiders will start dropping out of the trees to get close to the ground. Somehow they know... At times in the past it looked surreal with all these spider lines glinting in the exterior lights off of the building late at night.

30 degrees out on the porch right now. So maybe those temps in the 20s will be short lived before the sun comes up and starts warming things up.

Guess you got ice or snow now.

Freezing rain and 29 degrees. My windshield iced over several times early this morning on the interstate.

Yeah, when I woke up this morning, there was quite a bit of what looked like sleet over everything outside. And hours later when we uncovered a few of the trees, the tarps had a lot of slush on them. But temps only dropped down to around 31 degrees, so there was a good side to the cloudiness and precipitation.

Supposed to get colder the next few nights.

I'll be glad when this first week of 2018 is over and done with. So far the year has been pretty crappy, weatherwise.

Never got below 35 here.