Time Will Tell If Gardenia Gamble Pays Off
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Hill Country Living
By Coulter Fussell
I am happy to report that, in the past week, all of my in-laws have gotten electricity and water back in their homes. What a relief! Every family member has returned to modern society. In my observation, Boomers handled the aftermath of the storm better than some of the people I know who are my age. Is it because the Boomers grew up without air conditioning and walked to school barefoot uphill in the snow? Did that hardship finally pay off in the form of having the true grit to survive like a member of the Donner Party? Well, hopefully not exactly like how the Donner Party went about it, but surviving nonetheless.
Speaking of surviving, the jury is still out on the fate of my gardenias. In the days leading up to the storm, I went into a proactive planning mode to keep my gardenias alive. The two-phase nature of the storm — freezing rain followed by frigid temperatures — posed a problem. I knew I could keep the plants alive in the low-temps, as I had done so many times before, but I wasn’t sure if I could keep them alive while encased in an inch and a half of ice. My hypothesis was that if I could just keep them from getting wet in the first place, then they wouldn’t get popsicled! In this case, a typical bedsheet would not do. I covered the plants in plastic sheeting.
My mother promptly informed me that Martha Stewart said to not use plastic sheeting to protect gardenias. She told me that Martha Stewart has specially made burlap covers for her shrubs. Well, I’m happy for Martha Stewart. Martha has specially made burlap shrub covers and I have plastic sheeting for Sartain’s. We are all different.
Picking up the plastic sheeting from Sartain’s was wild! The place was the busiest I’ve ever seen it! As an almost-daily Sartain’s customer, I was so pleased to see everyone there even though it was not under ideal circumstances. Owners Joey and Lindsay were in high gear and said it was like a Black Friday sale situation. The hardware store is still busy, weeks later. I hope we continue to buy local, even when there’s not a natural disaster breathing down our necks. We have to remember on a clear-skied, warm weather Tuesday who showed up and supplied us when the times got tough.
Suffice it to say, my gardenia experiment didn’t go as planned. The plastic blew off three of the bushes, and the shrubs that kept their plastic collected ice like a hammock, requiring me to kick frozen glacier sheets off of 5-foot-tall bushes every few hours. At this point, you may think I love my gardenias too much. Maybe. But this was between me and Martha Stewart, I think.
I’ll report back over the course of the year which sets of plants wind up doing better – the ones that were encased in ice or the ones that were suffocated in plastic. Either situation sounds miserable.
But the ice is melted, and we can look forward to better days! Y’all mark Saturday, March 21st, down on your calendar for the next Casey Jones Music Festival! The Water Valley Main Street Association is working hard on planning this event and we have a lot to celebrate this year. Specifically, the warm sun.
