Fall is the time when the majority of people undertake the task of preparing the garden for winter. The tasks go beyond just cleaning and winterizing the house and barns. Protecting subtropical and half-hardy plants is an essential component of winterizing. Fantasy plants that often have no place in your area are fun to indulge in during the summer, but they need protection to withstand potentially lethal winter conditions.
Sometimes you miss a few, or the weather is bad, resulting in plants with freeze damage. These injured individuals are not always recoverable, although there are techniques to cure frozen plants. Can a frozen plant still be saved? The method is case-by-case, but the procedure does work in certain situations. Treating freezing damage to plants will not hurt anything, and you never know when one of your favourite garden plants may come back.
What is Freeze Damage?
Depending on the plant’s level of exposure and variety, the impacts manifest themselves differently. Sometimes the issue is just foliage damage, like discolouration and leaf tips that have been cold-burnt.
In some cases, freezing damage to plants may be seen right down to the crown or roots. The most challenging kind of recovering from is this one. The issues arise from freezing the cells inside the plant components, resulting in a cellular shift and permanently changing the plant’s tissue.
To defend themselves against frozen crystals behind the small membranes that explosively shred the cell’s composition plants transport water out of the cells as part of their defence. This reaction also hinders the plant from absorbing moisture, which causes some freezing damage to resemble too much time without water on the part of the plant.
Treatment for Frozen Plants
Can a frozen plant still be saved? This truly depends on the kind of plant and how long it was exposed to the cold. On all save the most tropical plants, light freezes are often something that a plant can recover from.
Remove damaged plant material from woody plants in the spring. You can detect which stems are dead in the late winter by scratching the bark. The tissue is still alive if the substance is green below. They will lose their leaves due to the freezing, but they usually re-leaf in the spring. After all threat of frost has gone, maintain the plants’ moisture and add a mild fertilizer.
More delicate plants will be unable to endure the freezing damage and will turn into annuals. Perennial plants that have been frozen-damaged may only have little root damage, in which case you can split the plant and replant the parts. The ones that recovered from the root area’s cold did not deal a fatal blow.
Succulent Freeze Damaged Plants
Unlike woody or most perennial varieties, succulents and cacti have distinct tissue. The bodies, stems, thick pads, and leaves all hold much water. Significant cellular damage is caused by freezing both within and outside the plant. But a lot of these plants are incredibly resilient.
Do not remove the stems or leaves from damaged succulents. Instead, keep an eye on them for a few weeks. Carefully pull on the internal leaves of plants like aloe and agave to see whether the core is harmed. The plant has succumbed and has to be destroyed if the inner leaves are easy to take out and are mushy and dark at the root. The plant may be saved if there are indications of fresh leaves and growth.