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Palm City Cold

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TREESNMORE:
Been up most of the night checking  heaters and covers at 2 Am it was 40 . I thought this was a waste of sleep. Now at 5 it is 32 with some frost. 

FL Boy:
The coldest we got in WPB was 40.  I brought in all my veggie starts last night and that was it.  Hope the short 32 degree temp didn’t cause any damage to your trees. 

bovine421:

--- Quote from: TREESNMORE on January 16, 2026, 05:20:18 AM ---Been up most of the night checking  heaters and covers at 2 Am it was 40 . I thought this was a waste of sleep. Now at 5 it is 32 with some frost.

--- End quote ---

At 5:00 a.m. no Frost 6:00 a.m. fost
If you look at your weather app it'll say 37°. Which is taking five feet off the ground.
I have two weather stations one with the probe one foot off the ground and the other about 7 ft in the air. The probe one foot off the ground which reporting 33 and went down to 32 while the other station was reporting 38 went down to 37.
This is where people run into trouble. They including me look at the weather app it'll give a temperature of 5 ft above the ground but young plants in the ground or Young trees are exposed to the lower temperatures because cold air Settles

netted cantaloupe


Sensor probe 1 ft off the ground


After leaving work at noon and working 5 hours fine tuning everything took a nap woke up at midnight looked at the temperature of 38 which is potential Frost. Turned on the irrigation went back to sleep waking up at 4:00 a.m. which is my normal routine. What was misleading was the predicted dew point Wednesday was above to predicted low temperature but Friday afternoon to predicted dew point lowered 27°. As the early morning progressed to humidity went up and so did the dew point to 32°

A micro jet sprinkler puts out 17 gallons per hour running 6 hours is a little over 100 gallons of water. Over Square foot area That equates About one and a half inches of rain With a saturation Of 12 to 16 inches deep In Sandy Lone soil According to the AI. Irrigating ten trees with equate to 1,000 gallons of water approximately which cost me about $9.. with the trees with fruit set I don't think that's an excessive amount to cause fruit drop but time will tell the only downside would be on recently open flowers would probably wash the pollen away but they all don't open at the same time so risk versus reward. Frost will kill the bloom just like powdery mildew so I will find out later in a season if it was a worthy Gamble I'm hoping this is the last event but early Monday morning is another potential event. Anywho I took the day off.






Latest Bean footage the grass is crunchy

Happy melon Vines

kapps:
It hit 32.9 on my weather station at 4:45 this morning before it started warming up. Still 36 degrees at 7am. This is about the same temp it got a few weeks ago during the last cold front. I have only been protecting my recently planted green Sapote. The Jackfruit, bananas, and jabos did fine.

Artocarpus:
Bovine, I am sure you know that when wind speed dies down that surfaces like leaves and ground will seek temps that of the dew point from convection. If we did not have any wind last night your near the ground sensor would have been much lower and the air aloft would try to catch up and be much lower too. It is no surprise that the lower sensor was measuring heat loss from the ground not the over all air temp. That is why weather stations measuring air temps have a roof over the thermometer so it is not measuring convection loss.Having said that when temps dip into the thirties with dew point below freezing protect from frost. The wind last night protected us from major damage.
Many a frosty mornings have had air temps well above freezing.

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