Before the Current, Extended Arctic Blast

Just a tiny peek inside a part of the Solar Room with a lot of happy plants. Unfortunately, if the latest weather forecast is correct, I fear I may lose half my house plants in the Solar Room.

They've updated the newest weather models. After a string of nights in the minus -10 to -15 degree range, the models are now predicting a historic low of MINUS -31 degrees next Tuesday!!!! That's cold enough for tears to freeze as they come out of your eye.

With our Solar Room not being heated, the 3 little space heaters, that we have running, won't be able to keep up with that kind of ultra extreme cold. At over MINUS THIRTY degrees outside, the temperature inside the Solar Room is almost be guaranteed to drop below freezing for a prolonged period of time. That will be a killer of everything growing. I’m very sad about this. This cold snap has been long and brutal and is expected to continue for still another 9 days.

The last time, the Metro hit an all time Record Cold Low, I was able to bring all of my Solar Room plants indoors and keep them safe. However all these years later, many of those plants (some tropical trees) have grown too large to move. They’ll be subject to whatever happens with the cold. I have plants out there (older than me) that date back to the 1960’s . When my mom stopped growing house plants, she gave her very favorites to me. They then thrived in our Solar Room. The first plant that my husband & I ever bought together as a married couple is also stuck out in the Solar Room. It will be super sad if I lose them. Many of the plants, that can't be moved out of the Solar Room, date back to when we were first married and have a lot of fond memories attached to them.

By squeezing things even more tightly together, I was able to bring a few more of the Solar Room plants into the main part of our house today. But now, we really don’t have any room to walk. I'm really out of room for any more plants. I've worked hard to do all I can. Still, I realize that many plants will be lost to the cold. It now seems almost unavoidable. I got to say, 2021 really sucks so far!!! For so many reasons; including the pandemic.

During this long, extreme artic blast, the local news has been telling people to add plants inside their homes to increase the humidity. I found that kind of amusing because our house is now wall to wall plants. I think we have more than our share of humidity makers.

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Meanwhile, on the coronavirus front, the local news has just reported that a lot of the vaccine to reach the state has been either wasted or even thrown out; for various reasons. Our state still remains at the bottom of COVID vaccination roll out.