wpid Screenshot 2013 05 12 18 01 24 1 236x300 Everybody Freeze: Protecting Your Plants with a Sand Bucket Okay Mother Nature, stop being funny! Another freeze warning, no – not like the Cha-Cha Slide song. It’s one thing to cover up flower beds, but now I needed to devise a plan to cover up the seedlings in the garden and the tomato plants. The later took a bit of MacGyvering using materials on hand – thank you Mickey Mouse!

It was pretty easy to figure to lay some tarps over the seeds coming up, but I didn’t have enough traps to cover the tomato plants. Think, think, think….. Ah ha! I need some buckets, like the plastic container my key lime came in, but I didn’t have enough. Ah ha!!! The sand buckets we got at DisneyWorld! Most kids meals at Caribbean Beach come served in a sand bucket so the kids can play with it. I know you can buy plant buckets, but really I don’t want to go shopping right now! I’m sure some people would pay a premium for Mickey Mouse Plant buckets! Finally, I grabbed some landscaping staples/anchor pins leftover from our landscaping fabric days to hold the buckets down.

At least after May 13, the chance for freeze/frost drops to 50%! (via the National Climatic Data Center)

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Limequat for Mother’s Day

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wpid 20130512 080127 225x300 Limequat for Mothers Day Happy Mother’s Day! This year for Mother’s Day, Dave and the kids got me (us) a Limequat tree! Limequat is a Key Lime grated onto a Kumquat. It’s been a whole two years, which feels like eternity to not have a fresh citrus growing at your house. The Key Lime tree was easily in the Top 10 list of things that was awesome about living in Florida. Seriously, if you live in a climate where you can grow something like this – do it. The Key Lime easily took care of itself and we had so much fruit. I think we started measuring fruit production in terms of how many key lime pies I made.

It’s next to impossible to find nice sized, reasonably priced citrus plants here in Pittsburgh, PA. Most of the nurseries we went too had the cutesy pot with a little plant for $30. I preferred a bigger plant in a non-cutesy container, because I know you’re just really paying for the container and not the plant. I mean if that’s what it had to be, then so be it, but it didn’t end up that way! We finally found this one at Best Feeds in Pittsburgh for $23. It’s roughly the same size as our first Key Lime tree we had in Florida.

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