Lake Fred

Lake Fred is an actual lake located in the flat pinelands of southern New Jersey. It is also one of my knicknames acquired while I was at college. There is (or was) a Lake Fred Folk Festival in the springtime.

Monday, November 07, 2005

Hibiscus Spot for Katrina

This is where we tried to save our hibiscus when we evacuated from Katrina. We wedged the plants into a protected corner of my yard behind my garage. We put the tallest plants in the corner, then the next tallest, in order to the smallest. We placed pot against pot, and on the outer edges, we placed flat trays with multiple pots. The corner was the northwest corner with a garage building up near both fences. The area was shaded by the branches of a Live Oak and a Water Oak in our neighbors' yards. In these pictures you see hardly any shade as Katrina had removed the shading branches. These pictures were taken about four weeks after the storm. At the height of the flooding, these plants were under water. The empty green pots had had cuttings placed in perlite. The cuttings and the perlite both floated away in the floodwater. When the water receded, the cuttings died. For the first two weeks, these plants received little water as it did not rain until Hurricane Rita made a visit. For the next three week, we watered the plants when we made periodic visits to the house. There was not a permanent move back into the house until five weeks after Katrina.
In retrospect, we did very well in saving our plants. We have been very busy, so we have not been able to inventory our plants to see what was saved and what was lost. We had roughly 75 varieties before the storm. I believe that we'll have between 65 to 70 varieties when it is over. We had about half of the varieties growing in the ground, of which only three have died (Kona, Sahara Wind and Bob Harkins), but we had duplicates of those varieties in pots, so we avoided losing those cultivars. That's a good thing as I really liked all three of those cultivars. I'll try to feature pictures of these three varieties in upcoming posts real soon.

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