Where are we now with the weather?
Most of us as kids woke up early in the morning and turned on the radio or television to find out if school was going to be closed on snowy, icy mornings. That was before the era of superintendents’ mass emails and social media posts. But one thing that remained fairly consistent was that school was rarely called off until wee hours of the same morning.
This week, at least where I live (north suburb of DFW), school districts started sending word out mid-afternoon yesterday (Wednesday) that they’d be closed down today (Thursday), and many even boldly said there would be no school on Friday as well.
To us gardeners that sounded like 2021’s horrific weather must have been rolling back in. We rushed out with the frost cloth, and we filled up the feeders. I hesitated to write anything definitive here until I had more detailed information.
So here it is 3 p.m. Thursday. We’re going to send this thing out in 3 hours, and I need to come up with something brilliant to justify this spot in the newsletter. But what I see outside my windows isn’t really all that bad. In fact, it’s actually quite lovely.
Let’s look at the facts…
• 2021 was an anomaly. It was really cold. Really, really cold.
• January 2025 is acting normally. These temperatures have been and are, for most parts of the state, about what we would normally expect.
• That cold spell followed warm weather for that time of year. Plants had geared up to start growing. After all, it was near the end of February 2021, and some of our bulbs and early spring annuals were already blooming.
• Now, in early January 2025, we’re just going into the main part of the winter. Plants have really only recently gone dormant. No flowers yet. No buds of new leaves popping out.
• In February 2021, it got really, really cold, and it stayed cold for a long time.
• This January 2025 cold spell has come in, lasted a couple of days, and will move out by the weekend, and during that time it will not get anywhere near as cold as it was 4 years ago.
• The cold of 2021 extended clear down to the Texas Gulf Coast. Temperatures well below freezing, even along the I-10 corridor and beyond. That was awful.
• I just checked 25 Texas cities on my Weatherbug app, and many of their weather stations are forecasting low temperatures the next two nights barely into the 20s – many of them not even to freezing. It looks like the freezing line won’t be much south of I-20. (But I’m speaking in very general terms as a horticulturist, not a meteorologist.)
• Most of this precipitation has been snow (as of my last check at 3 p.m. today). Snow is a lot less harmful than freezing rain that coats trees’ branches and evergreens’ leaves with ice. Snow actually insulates and protects against cold damage. Unless it gets so deep that its weight breaks branches, snow is usually your friend.
• A band of freezing rain, sleet, and “mixed precipitation” also hit just south of today’s “snow zone.” I haven’t heard enough yet about ice damage in other parts of the state, but if that is a problem where you are, be very careful around damaged trees. Their branches can be compromised and therefore hazardous. In most cases it’s better to let a certified arborist do limb removal. Assess that need this weekend once things thaw out. I’m especially concerned about trees with branches already hurt by the cold of February 2021.
• So, net thought from it all: You hopefully don’t have much to worry about with this cold spell and precipitation event. If you covered your tender plants with frost cloth as I did, I’d suggest leaving the cover in place for a few days after the thaw. It won’t hurt the plants, and you’ll get a good idea of whether additional cold lies ahead. I’ve left frost cloth on my plants for as long as 8 or 10 weeks. While I wouldn’t do that with annuals like pansies, it certainly never hurts my cast iron plants up here in North Texas.