And...the Aftermath!

Our cold snap is now over! Up until this point the weather had been so mild that I actually harbored hopes that we would get through this winter without a really hard freeze. It's happened before, and I'm not far from the water.

But no such luck this year! After the first major snow the temperature fell and hovered around 28F (-2C) for a day or two. Not a deep freeze by most cold region standards and most of the garden is unscathed. I decided to do an experiment in Arctic training for an Aloe arborea (I have another one that I brought in). It does not look happy though it seems that the parts of the plants that were buried in snow are still firm. The outer ends of the leaves are complete jelly though. San Francisco received a freeze like this back in the early 90s, there was a lot of damage but lots of things did come back from their roots.

I had two large Brugmansias in pots, one Charles Grimaldi with pale orange flowers, and one unidentified pink one. In past years the pink one has seemed to be hardier than Charles, but this year it's suffered more from very light freezes we've gotten this year. i planted one pink one out into the soil last year and grew like a house on fire, but unless the roots survived (there is a fairly good chance they did actually), it's toast. Time will tell. I'll have to wait for the snow to finish melting before I can tell what happened to the sweet peas that had volunteered and grown nearly 5 inches...

And here, just for touristic value, is what the Bosphorus looked like today from the hill up above Anadoluhisarı. Tomorrow the temps are supposed to get to 10C, so there will be no more of the white stuff by this time tomorrow evening! But we still have February and March to get through...