Southwest Sierra #104 – Alleghany Aloes & Climbing Roses

This week, we are back in the garden. In SS#102, I talked about hard frosts and light frosts. Later, I wondered what the official definition of a “Hard Frost” is. In my mind, it is anything below approximately 28 degrees Fahrenheit. I say “approximately” because there are many variables, such as wind, ground temperature, and the duration of the cold.

Upon further investigation, I found the following definition in The Farmer’s Almanac: “A hard frost is a period of at least four consecutive hours of air temperatures that are below 28°F (–2°C). It is also known as a “killing frost.” A light frost occurs when the nighttime temperature drops to at or just below 32°F (0°C). A hard frost will kill the top growth of most perennials and root crops.”

Early this spring, at the end of March, three of the grandkids came and stayed for a few days. We were experiencing a “heat wave” after several days of snow. The kids got to sled the first day they were here, and the next day, the snow was gone. A friend called and asked me if I had any Aloe Vera, as she needed it to treat a burn. I had two potted Aloes, and they were crammed with baby plants begging to be thinned out. I dumped the pots and made a small bag of plants for her. Granddaughter Nova and I then proceeded to place the remaining 26 baby aloes plus the two mother plants in pots filled with a mix of sand and finished compost. We left the baby plants on the potting table outside. I told myself to keep an eye on the weather forecast, predicting a need to bring them in from the cold.

A couple of days later, I went to the kids’ house in Citrus Heights for two nights. The temps were in the 80s, and I relished some downtime with the kids and grandbaby. After I got home, it rained on and off for a couple of weeks. I forgot about the Aloe Vera plants until one April morning we got up and the thermometer read 27 degrees! I threw on some clothes, ran outside, and brought the aloes inside to thaw. The pots were frozen solid, and I was annoyed at myself for forgetting about them. After they thawed out in the living room, I placed them on the closed-in back porch near a window, where I watched them closely for the next couple of weeks. They had a sickly transparent look, and many of the outer leaves died, but after about a week, a bright green center appeared in all but one. The sickly transparent look gradually vanished, and the centers began to grow. Evidently, the duration of the cold snap wasn’t long enough to kill them. Alleghany Aloes.

There are several drought-tolerant antique roses in Alleghany. A bright red climber named Paul Scarlet does exceptionally well here. In the early 1990s, when we were living in the shack on Miners Street, I rooted and potted a cutting from one that was flourishing on a trellis where a house once stood. The house had burned down prior to my family’s arrival in 1975, and I never saw it. When we moved to the Hope House in 1996, I brought the Paul Scarlet along and planted it next to the little cabin where the Red Winged Flickers nest. Two other Paul Scarlets were already established on the property, a large one on the corner of the house and another along the road.

With the new firesafe rules, we aren’t supposed to plant climbers of any kind on our houses, but I can’t bring myself to cut the Paul Scarlet off the cabin. The stems have been thinned to about half as many as they once had, and I try to stay on top of keeping the dead wood cut out. I did remove the main stems and roots of the very large and old Paul Scarlet that was on the corner of the house. It had propagated new plants a little further away, and those remain. I am training them to grow AWAY from the house and not on it.

The incident with the Aloe Vera plants reminds me of something that happened when our son Wyatt was a teenager. He was living in the cabin next door with a pet goldfish in a fishbowl. One morning, he woke up, and the water in the fishbowl was frozen solid. He quickly built a fire, and when the fishbowl thawed out, the fish started swimming around! Wyatt named his fish “Been Frozen.”