Growing Plants that Exceed the Zone Tolerance (up or down)?

This is a thread to continue discussion from the Lilacs in Florida thread.

What plants are you growing that are rated for a higher or lower USDA Zone tolerance?

I usually try to push the Zone from plants that are rated for more tropical climes to my Zone 8b/9a garden and get them through the few weeks of potentially freezing weather with some winter protection. I have a Petrea volubilis (so called Tropical Wisteria though it is not at all related to wisteria) native to Costa Rica that survives the winters apparently because I planted it against my Podocarpus hedges and they provide protection from the winter's winds. On a really frigid night, I can drape some plastic over it. It bloomed for me the first time last Spring. (see photo below)

Going in the opposite direction for colder clime plants in our sub-tropics, I've tried to naturalize some Spring bulbs - mostly paperwhite narcissus which do bloom here annually when well established. My paperwhites grow splendid, healthy foliage each year (now is their current peak for growth), but out of the 400 bulbs I planted, I currently only get about 4 flower spikes! Hopefully, they will someday give me the December field of fragrant paperwhites I hold in my imagination. I've also found that the miniature yellow daffodill, Tete-Et-Tete, will return from year to year and bloom even more dependably than the paperwhite narcissus. I've not found any tulips that can survive our hot, wet summers. They will bloom the first Spring after Fall planting, but then seem to rot in the ground.

I experimented this past season with some native plants from my home state of West Virginia: Bloodroot, Black Cohosh, and a few others (purchased on eBay from a supplier who promised they are cultivated from root stock and not taken from the wild). It will be interesting to see if they will come up this Spring. I also planted a Bleeding Heart (Dicentra spectabilis) shipped to me by a catalog company instead of the plant I ordered which was out of stock. It flowered beautifully soon after arrival, then died back to the ground. I don't know if it will return, but hope springs eternal in my garden!

Jeremy

This message was edited Dec 14, 2005 11:24 PM

It'll come back, Jeremy! I have a Bleeding Heart also (which I call "Al Franken" heh) and it comes back every year.

I'm pushing zones this year with a majesty palm that's in a pot and too heavy to bring inside, as well as a pineapple that will put someone's eye out. It's too dangerous to live with, so it's going to have to make it in my driveway, too bad, so sad. LOL

My tropical hibiscus is also stuck outside in a pot. I've moved all these tender babies up next to the house and will cover them in a hard freeze. One thing I've learned: In Tallahassee, the weather center is at the airport which is in a very flat, low part of the county. The temps are colder there than anywhere else. So if the forecast is for 32, I can rest assured that, at my house at least, it will be at least 5 degrees warmer.

Everything else I brought inside: the upright giant elephant ear, the alocasia, the root beer plants that MollyMc gave me, the parrot lily and gloriosa lily that I got from you, and of course, ALL of my hot peppers.

There's a hot pepper farm in my spare bedroom, under grow lights, if anyone wants any. ;>)

Hi, Diane!

Thanks for the tip on the Root Beer plant. Mine is in the ground, so I'll give it some extra protection with mulch and plastic cover.

The Parrot Lilies (Alstromeria psticcina) will survive very happily outdoors and spread like crazy as they get established. Apparently they may be from a Zone 8b in Brazil in their native habitat?

Also, I had success with growing ornamental peppers by just crushing their pods and spreading their seed around last Fall. (Be sure not to touch your eyes for several hours after crushing the pods --- I learned that tip by my own bad experience -- OUCH!)

I planted two 3' Ficus benjaminas by my doorstep (in the spot where the Castor Bean (Ricinus communis) were growing but were transplanted when they were about to grow taller than my 2-story house!). The F. benjaminas were rescue plants I found on the street in a totally neglected and near leafless state, but they recovered nicely with some TLC. They will be in a protected spot under the eave of the porch and I'll cover them with plastic and a blanket on the coldest nights.

My Pony Tail Palm (Beaucarina recurvata) went into the ground last year and survived the winter with a makeshift plastic tent. I have Buddha Belly plants (Jatropha sp.) surrounding it which also survived last winter. The Pony Tail is now about 3 ft high and getting a nice, fat base. It was also a rescue plant that I found as a bare root bulb struggling to survive near the doorstep when I bought my house three years ago. It is an especially significant plant for me because I think its plantive screams for "HELP!" were what drew me mystically to find this house and buy it. It was joined in its screams by the Southern Grape Fern (Botrychium biternatum), a seldom seen plant, that populates areas of my yard, and that probably would have been mown down by a buyer less attuned to appreciating attractive weeds.

I grew weary with the Crown of Thorns plants (Euphorbia millii) being top heavy and tipping over in their pots and ripping open my arms when I tried to upright them, so they went into the ground this Spring. I think they will do O.K. outdoors with some winter protection.

I'm becoming ever more lazy about dragging pots of semi-tropicals in and out for the few months of winter and prefer instead to plant them in the ground and put my effort into winter protection on the coldest nights. There will come a day when we have a very hard freeze on a bitterly cold night and I will lose some of them, I'm sure, but for the time they survive in the ground, they flourish and seem to me to be far more healthy and attractive than when in pots. So far, I've been lucky with my winter protection methods being sufficient to keep them alive in our relatively mild winters for the past few years.

P.S. Here's a tip I discovered for an instant French cloche/bell jar for overwintering plants: I look for old, leaking aquariums tossed out on the street (especially the large, tall ones). I cap the aquariums over some of my tropicals and they have their own minature "greenhouse" for the winter!

Jeremy

That is a fabulous idea! I'm going to have to scour my neighborhood in the next few weeks. The FSU semester is ending and college students throw out everything when they leave town!

I tend to become more lazy after the first year of having a tender plant. I brought a lot of things inside just to make sure they will be very well established if I manage to get them into the ground at some point next season.

I also have a cardomom plant that I bring in religiously, with the plumeria, before temps go below 50 at night. The plumies, I'm told, can't really take temps in the 40s and I want the cardomom to produce fruit so I can make really great basmati rice. Heh. So I try to not let it go dormant.

I had the same idea with the peppers: the lady at the native nursery told me that all peppers are tropical perennials and with sufficient protection, they should just keep on producing. I remember having a neighbor in Boca who had a 4' Thai pepper shrub, so I'm quite sure it's possible. I found the leaves all dropped off when I brought 'em in -- must have gone about that too fast and too late in the season. I'm sure the plants will recover and now that they're under my nose, they get extra special TLC. If I left them outside to fend for themselves, I'd forget to cover them when we get a hard freeze and I'd end up losing them anyway. I lost about 20 bromeliads one year due to my lazyness... Which reminds me, I also brought in all those bromeliads you sent with Sidney and they're all trying to bloom right now. I'll take pics and post 'em.

Wonderful news about the bromeliads! I've been so busy lately, I haven't had a chance to stroll out to my bromeliad patch to see if mine are trying to bloom.

I discovered this morning that I had my first attempted break-in/theft at my house in the 3 years I've been here. Some *#(*%)#)W person managed to break the lock on the storm door I just installed on my new greenhouse a few months back. They then turned my pot of patchouli upside down and placed a wooden orchid basket containing a dendrobium on top of that pot to stand on and try to reach over the top of my glass door to my art studio/garage to unlatch the hook near the top of the glass. Fortunately, they were not successful and I don't seem to have anything missing. I'm very lucky because they could have made off with about a thousand dollars worth of garden and shop tools. Some teens I had never seen before rang my doorbell Monday morning and asked if I had any yard work they could do. "No, thanks." is always my answer to that because no one but me knows which of my weeds are precious and which are not. My instincts street/sense alarms went off after they left and I went out and locked all the greenhouse/art studio/workshop doors that I normally am casual about locking. The attempted theft probably occurred Monday afternoon while I was at work. I think the patchouli will be resilient enough to recover from being squashed -- I've taken cuttings from it in the past and can use the broken pieces to start new plants. The dendrobium orchid that was in the wooden basket is also miraculously mostly unharmed. Its flower bud spike somehow managed to survive the mangling! GRRRRRRRR!!! to all thieves and robbers. But this was a wake up call for me to be more careful. I will now add extra locks and security measures to the outdoor buildings.

Wow. I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm glad you basically managed to remain unscathed. When I lived in Ft. Lauderdale, my place was robbed once. I think it was an inside job by some hired workers the landlord claimed were trustworthy. Because of the way the place was set up, it couldn't have been some random thieves wandering by. My cat was completely traumatized by the event. (She hollered and meowed at me until I found all the evidence. I think she was telling me, "There was this guy, and he came in through the window, but he wouldn't let me go outside, and he took your stuff, and some paper (money) you had... and he wouldn't pet me. Rowr. ROWR MEOW ROWR!" Poor Boo Boo Kitty. )

I'm sure the patchouli will recover. Think of it this way, if any more teenagers show up smelling like Grateful Dead Hippies... you'll have caught your theives! LOL

You may also consider placing agave or really harsh cacti near your windows and doors. Ooo: a crown of thorns would probably inflict sufficient damage as to deter would-be breakers-in! My pineapple could take someone's eye out...

Jeremy,
If no one has told you by now, you need to get those ficus outta there now. Do not plant them anywhere near structures, underground pipes, etc. They get huge and the underground roots will get into everything and will tear up and underground pipes they get near.
If you want to keep them near the house, put them in large pots and keep the roots trimmed if they escape the pots.
Jan...

Thanks, Budge, for the advice on the Ficus. I hadn't considered that aspect of their growth habit, but do know that they make some intense root systems. The tallest one I have in a pot is so root bound in the pot that I don't think I could ever get it out to repot it. I'll take your advice and plant the two 3' ficus in 30 gallon pots with all the drain holes sufficiently blocked so that the roots can't break through and destroy my foundation and pipes. A 30 gallon pot should allow them to grow to about the height I would eventually like them to be.

Sorry for going off topic with the theft report. I was a bit out of skew this morning when I first discovered the break-in. As it turns out with closer inspection this evening, I did lose items from the category: "things easy to carry on two bicycles." = five of my power tools (drill, belt sander, skill saw, power saw, and reciprocating saw).
It could have been much worse, especially if they had decided to just be vindictive and destroy my orchid collection. I made the police report this evening and they were very considerate about sending someone out to take fingerprints, but it is basically "too bad, so sad." I'll be more careful in the future.

Jeremy

Hi Jeremy,
You won't regret potting the ficus. I have a variegated ficus and it will never see the ground. LOL Sorry to hear about the break in. The only time I ever had a theft in the 15 yrs I've been here is when I left the front garage door open to run up to the corner convenience store for soda. At the time, I was breeding parrots and had a garage full of birds. Someone actually had the nerve to come into the garage and take off with a parakeet in a small cage. I guess they decided on that one because the cage was easy to carry on a bicycle. They were spotted in the neighborhood but no one knew who they were or where they came from.
Jan...

JaxFlaGardener, I'm glad this thread continued over from our other one.
I've been pushing the limits any way I can, some work, some don't. I have been growing hostas in water only, although they shouldn't really grow here in Orlando, but the water (with a tadpole or 2) has worked for several years now. As a child I was raised in Ohio, so still continue to get a few things to grow here, although now I'd never trade my tropicals for anything! I simply can't get dill or cilantro to grow here, and I've tried every way in the world.
MerryMary
PS-Our storage facility was broken into on Thanksgiving day, zillions of dollars of large electronic equipment was taken. Grrr....makes me think bad thoughts, but if I act on them, Santa won't bring me anything, and I know he may already be upset with me for "harvesting" a coleus snipping from a restaurant parking lot and rooting it at home.

MerryMary, as a fellow proponent of "harvesting" (or what I like to think of as selective pruning for the benefit of leggy plants I find neglected at mega garden centers (and some smaller plant nurseries if I'm purchasing other plants), I don't think there is any bad karma in giving a good home to a portion of a needy plant. LOL But I may be wrong and maybe on the day of reckoning, Buddha will send me back for a thousand lifetimes as a Coleus. I would be happy with that fate, I think.

Sorry to hear of all your theft stories above, especially with your more consideral financial and personal loss as compared to my loss of old, worn shop tools. I think I mostly feel the loss of the sense of freedom and comfort I had experienced since buying this house and my serenity at becoming accustomed to not having to lock everything up as soon as I was done with it. But I suppose we all have to err on the side of caution and do everything possible to protect what we want to keep.

MerryM, I'm very interested in your method of growing hostas in water only! I tried some hostas here and they did great for a while until the slugs found them. They were reduced to stubble in just a night or two. I've found some plants that look very similar to hostas, Homalomenas. They have been growing great for me with no slug damage and are completely heat tolerant in a shady location. It will be interesting to see if they survive the winter.

I'm surprised dill won't grow for you. It does fine here until the point where it bolts into flower and then dies off (as many herbs seem to do). It can be prolonged by snipping off the flower umbrels as soon as they appear. I've stopped having to plant dill because I usually have a dill or two spring up somewhere in the garden from self-sown seed each year. Maybe I was just lucky with the variety of dill seed I got, but I'm fairly sure it was a Big Lots 5 cent special pack.

And DZilla - I will now sniff every possible suspect that comes into my neighborhood to see if they are, indeed, one of the patchouli stompers. I used patchouli as a body oil back in the early 70's - it wasn't long before everything I came into contact with smelled of patchouli -- all my clothing, the furniture, the sheets, the Volkswagen, the pets..... odd that the herb itself has such a gentle wisp of the aroma. I suppose the scent is intensified in the refining of the oil from the plant.

If anyone wants to adopt one of my patchouli plant's broken arms and start your own patchouli, just let me know. There are lots of its stems to go around now that it has been squashed. It can't survive the Zone 8b winters outdoors (I found that out the hard way from a previous patchouli plant). I can send a stem out in an envelope to anyone that wants one. They root very easily.

Jeremy

:: Runs outside to bring patchouli in ::

I let it go to seed/flower. Thanks for the reminder!

Another note about patchouli. Back in the late 80's, when I was in college, the Grateful Dead had a top 10 hit, so there was this resurgence of the hippy thing while I was in school. Suffice it to say, there were stinky hippies all over my campus, reeking of patchouli oil. (We called it "hippy oil.") I had a boyfriend who loved the stuff. I still found things (including the cat) that smelled like him TWO YEARS after we broke up and he moved out. LOL ("Oh, I haven't seen this t-shirt in a long ti-- sniffs -- Eyyyyeeewwww!")

Just to keep this post on task: both dill and cilantro will grow here if you do it in the winter time. I'd start dill right bout now and cilantro in late Feb. Generally, by April the cilantro will bolt and taste bitter. Then you can switch to culantro, which I am not as fond of. The dill will then serve (by April) as a larval feeder plant for the swallowtail family of flutterbies... I have not had as much success with dill as with cilantro; I suspect the high humidity has a lot to do with that.

Hey, Dzilla. I recall that resurgence of hippidome in the 80's. I was able to pull out all my old tie-dyed T-shirts and be very fashionable, though my bell bottom pants had long prior become threadbare.

Back on topic -- one way I've found to very effectively provide winter protection for tender plants is to cover them in a hefty mulch of about 3 - 4 inches of hay around the root and base stem and even mounding the hay up over the leaves. The hay can be easily pulled back in the Spring and the plants will resume growth quickly from the non-frost killed stems rather than having to wait for the plant to regrow from the roots. Hay is relatively cheap (about $4 a bale last winter here). I used about 10 bales to cover most of my cold sensitive plants on my 1/2 acre. Hay will decay rather quickly in the Spring, but does provide some assistance in blocking weed seeds from being able to sprout and grow. It makes the earthworms VERY happy and adds a lot of humus to the soil. The only drawbacks I've found is that I have to basically remove all the hay if I am doing broadcast planting of seeds. I also discovered last year that the hay seeds themselves will sprout and grow as weeds. I had quite a hay field this autumn when I was not able to get out and weed and tend my garden during several very busy weeks/months. But the hay can be pulled up easily and added back to the garden where it lays to continue the earth feeding process. I have a source for hay bales within about 5 miles of my house near the heart of downtown Jacksonville -- A throwback to the days when Cowford (Jacksonville) was a more agricultural-based community.

Jeremy

Although this is even more of a cow-town than Jax, I still haven't the faintest idea of where I might find a source for hay 'round these parts. My patchouli is in a pot (pun so not intended ;>) ), so I'll just grab it whenever I bring in the bird of paradise and it can live in the kitchen for the next two-three months.

You need to locate a "Feed Store" that supplies feed to horse & cattle owners. Unless you're near a horse or farming community, you probably won't find one unless you go some distance.

Doing a quick search of Tallahassee, here is a list of feed stores that should carry hay and feed. Not sure the closest to you.
Jan...

Ashley Feed & Hardware
8056 Wakulla Springs Road, Tallahassee, FL 32305
(850) 421-7703

Buffington's Ranch & Pet Supply
2591 Centerville Road, Tallahassee, FL 32308
(850) 553-4889

Country Feed Store & Garden Supply
6260 Blountstown Highway, Tallahassee, FL 32310
(850) 574-3333

Feed Shack
7513 Woodville Highway, Tallahassee, FL 32305
(850) 421-7212

Florida Farm & Feed
3600 Weems Road Suite C, Tallahassee, FL 32317
(850) 877-0932

Gramling's Inc
1010 South Adams Street, Tallahassee, FL 32301
(850) 222-4812

Thanks!

That last one isn't too far away. They're all sort of on the outskirts of town, and most of them are on the other side. I live just barely northwest of the center (known as mid-town), so Gramling's is my best bet.

I'll bet they'll have okra seed too!

Thank you so much for doing a search for me.

No problem. I live in a city but just a few blocks from a horse community and have a feed store about 6 blocks away. I can even get my dog and cat vaccines there.
Jan...

I LOVE our local feed store where I buy my hay. I always feel like I'm stepping back in time, especially in the Spring when they have bins of vegetable seeds to scoop out and purchase (for the true agrarian) and the fresh hatched chicks and ducklings, and an assortment of bunnies. So far, I've managed to avoid the tempation to bring home some chicks, though I did do some rabbit rescue for a while of unwanted mature rabbits. I was afraid my neighbors would complain about my free range bunnies, but they all seemed to love having them around, especially the kids! They mostly ate the weeds except for a few of my plants they found too delicious to resist -- Mexican terragon being the only one they ate to the ground, but it rebounded after their "pruning." What they took away in their nibbling they replenished with their natural fertilizer.

Jeremy

This message was edited Dec 15, 2005 6:23 PM

I wonder if I could train my dogs to be nice to bunnies.

They sleep with the cat; I don't see why not.

I've also considered acquiring a small goat, but I don't have enough grass to keep one happy and it would eat all my pretty plants. If I ever have a property with a buncha grass... I might get a goat instead of a lawnmower. I'd look into it at least.

Dzilla - I had a female goat when I lived on the outskirts of Tally while in graduate school at FSU. Be careful if you buy a nanny goat -- our goat seemed barely more than a few months old when we got her, but she was already pregnant! She kept swelling up and I thought I was feeding her too much and that I was making her overly fat until we found her bleeting and crying one day in agony, called the vet to see if we could get an emergency appointment, and then saw two little lips and teeth emerge from the back of her and realized what was going on -- our baby goat was about to give birth! Fortunately, a nurse friend that had worked in a maternity ward showed up mystically on cue and we spent the rest of the afternoon birthing Matilda, encouraging her by shouting "Push, Matilda, push!!!" and breathing heavily along with her as per La Maize method until her son, Marvin, finally emerged and hit the ground. Two goats for the price of one was more than we bargained for, but it was fun having the newborn to play with. Matilda did eat everything in sight, especially the grape vines and even the sharp thorned rose bushes! And she was able to easily amble over the wire fence in which we tried to keep her. She struck up a friendly relationship with all the neighborhood dogs and ran with them as part of their pack. The dogs seemed to enjoy the diversity of species and welcomed the weird dog with horns without discrimination. A lesson for us all there, I think.

Jeremy

This message was edited Dec 16, 2005 9:35 AM

This message was edited Dec 16, 2005 11:46 PM

Wow. Great story. (Great goat names too!)

Me thinks I need much more room for happy goats. Will stick that on my list of "maybe sometime later in life, but not right now..."