This isn't 100% about Florida gardening, but it is about 'combating' Florida's mild winters. At the beginning of this winter I had a scheme to try using concrete form tubes as wind breaks/heat retainers around some of my cold sensitive plants. The scheme failed. Not only did it not prevent my firebush from getting burned (ironic) on the one night we dipped below 30, but I found out that a few rains were all it took to warp the tubes into unusable shapes. If I revisit this scheme next year, I will have to find a way to protect the tubes from the rains and some way to provide heat (possibly adding lights of some sort) rather than simply containing it.

That said, this new mad scheme has nothing to do with that set up. Rather it has to do with protecting plants in my northwest bed. This bed is by far the largest in my yard and it is where most of my plants will end up residing. For the most part I am picking plants that can either handle the colder temps or will come back from roots, but since I was an idiot and moved some young pentas plants the other day, I currently have it covered in hopes that I can prevent the little guys from dying over the next few nights (lowest forecasted is 37, so I should be okay. But it got me thinking. Not far from my NW bed is a certain vent in the side of my house. A vent that is attached to a device that tends to use lots of hot air and blows that hot air out through the vent (along with lint). Yep. It's my dryer vent. And it just so happens I tend to wait until it's bed time to start the dryer. So my thought is this... get some dryer tubing and pipe it from the outside vent to the NW bed. This would not be a permanent setup, but only for those rare, really cold nights or nights following doing something foolhardy. The idea is rather simple. As the dryer is doing its job, it pumps warm air under a sheet tent. Obviously it wouldn't run all night, but perhaps that bit of trapped heat will make the difference between losing or keeping transplants during a 'surprise' freeze.

Any thoughts or concerns that aren't coming to me at the moment?

And with that, time to start a load in the dryer and... zzzzzz