MED - CULT: Freeze effects on MDBs

Hi Everyone!

I only grow a handful of MDBs, but the three nights in a row last month
with temperatures in the low 20's (April 11, 12, & 13) provided an
interesting test of their susceptibility to freezing.

There are four established clumps of MDBs growing in one bed that happens
to be the worst frost pocket in my garden. When the three freezing nights
occurred, the buds on ALPINE LAKE were well formed within the fans. The
others were showing no evident signs of bud formation. ALPINE LAKE bloomed
on April 20 with no evidence of frost damage except for some blotches of
darker pigmentation on the falls of the earliest blooms to open. It
produced over 50 bloom stalks. None of the others has bloomed to date, but
DITTO and ZIPPER each have one bud about to open on clumps with over 30
fans. I cut open some fans on these that should have bloomed and found
nothing inside except a brown and withered remnant about 1/4 inch long of
an incipient bloom that had been in the earliest stages of development (the
fourth MDB in this planting is PUPPET BABY, which always blooms much later
than the others and still shows no signs of bud development).

 Jeff Walters in northern Utah (Zone 4)
cwalters@cache.net
"This is the Place" - where April was indeed the cruellest month.
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