Down here in usually sunny central Florida the locals consider 50 degrees as cold. People bundle up, wear hoodies and scurry about going from place to place as quickly as possible outdoors. Tourists still wear shorts and go to the beach because it is Florida and they paid for their vacations to be warm.
Back home, I recall that it did not feel cold to me until the temperature drops to below 20 degrees. Really cold was close to zero and “Stupid Cold” was minus 10 or lower, with or without wind chill.
A reader from Halcott Center in Greene County emailed me that it was minus 21 in her garden last Saturday morning. That is stupid cold!
I hope your property has an insulating layer of at least six inches of snow on the ground to help prevent the ground from freezing very deeply. In our upstate New York region, water pipes, by code, must be three feet or lower beneath ground level to ensure they don’t freeze and burst. Many homeowners have learned this fact the hard way by burying water pipes less than that depth.
Water is really the only substance that is liquid between 0 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit that expands when frozen. Most things will generally contract when chilled. “It’s the shrinkage,” as I recall George Constanza from “Seinfeld’ exclaiming.
This explains why your garden grows new crops of rocks every year, despite your best efforts to get rid of them. As rocks allow water to form beneath them on warm days, due to their density, the resulting liquid freezes when it gets really cold and the rocks are pushed upward. Every year we get to see a new crop of rocks magically appear, in an area that had no rocks last fall. This also explains why perennials and other plants are sometimes “heaved” out of the ground by alternating periods of freezing and thawing. Now would be a good time to apply several inches of mulch on top of perennial beds to keep them frozen and the plants intact.
Trees and shrubs are also challenged by sub-zero weather when their water plumbing, i.e. xylem vessels, are subject to extremely low temperatures. Bark is a good insulator, but not good enough to retain above-freezing temperatures. Woody plants are not as passive as we might suspect. In the fall, shorter day lengths cause cell walls to become more permeable and water moves out of the cells, leaving behind a concentrated slurry of sugars, proteins and acids that have a much lower freezing temperature. Water that was moved out of the cells
is now in between cells and it is so pure that there are no nucleation sites on which ice crystals can form, thus allowing the water to remain unfrozen, even at temperatures below 32 degrees.
Needle bearing, or broad-leafed evergreens such as rhododendrons, really have to adapt to survive, especially on sunny days. Sunlight triggers photosynthesis, requiring pores on the underside of leaves (stomates) to open up to allow carbon dioxide to enter and water vapor to exit. Rhododendrons will curl their leaves into tubes to reduce the green tissue area that is exposed to sunlight and pine needles will droop directly downward, also to limit exposure. Go out and take a look at rhododendrons or pine trees the next time it gets stupid cold! Fortunately, photosynthesis, like many chemical reactions, slows dramatically at lower temperatures.
Some animals also have evolved ways to cope with extreme cold. Some species of frogs will have ice crystals form under their skin, but high concentrations of sugars in the internal organs prevent them from freezing. A partially frozen frog can have its heart stop beating and appear to be dead, but once warmed up, it revives with apparently no serious aftereffects. Humans have also developed some ways to survive extreme cold by shunting blood to internal organs. People have been revived after rescue from icy cold water long after they should have drowned!
One good thing about stupid cold weather is that it may reduce the number of disease-carrying ticks that survive, unless the ticks are on a warm-blooded host, such as a deer. Laboratory studies show that ticks will die in a freezer at temperatures between minus 2 degrees and plus 14 degrees Fahrenheit. Of course, the laboratory experiment does not account for the ticks hiding in a warmer spot, such as under bark or leaf litter.
Other insects, such as wooly bear caterpillars, produce glycerol that allows them to remain unfrozen at temperatures in the teens. Some very interesting insect-like critters, called snow fleas, are quite active even on sub-freezing days. These tiny springtails are often seen on snowdrifts in February and March where they resemble dark-colored moving soot!
Bob Beyfuss lives and gardens in Schoharie County. Send him an e-mail to rlb14@cornell.edu.
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Bob Beyfuss: How nature responds when it gets stupid cold - The Daily Freeman
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