Winter losses

[Nick_G]

I had a few nights down to minus 3C in my unheated greenhouse last winter. So far the losses have been 2 Lophophora williamsii, a Lophophora fricii (one of my favourite plants unfortunately) and 2 Turbinicarpus jauernigii with 2 more looking a bit suspect. All the roots were sound, just mushy heads.

So not too bad really, how did you do?

[iann]

This winter was too warm to learn much. The only things that show any obvious damage are a couple of L. lophophoroides seedlings and even those aren't dead yet. Maybe some things have lost their roots and I haven't rotted them with unhelpful water.

[daniel82]

Everything was fine right up until middle of february, my garage roof leaked a bit and two trays got wet. From those i've lost maybe 8 plants. An echinopsis lochinvar, two echinocereus, a couple of gymno's, a mamm and the one that actually upset me was my 5 year old turbincarpus lophophoroides. Funnily enough, non of them rotted from the roots, it was all top down which made it almost impossible to save any. Plus an ariocarpus got nibbled by a mouse and that let botrytis in which killed it.

They're replaceable and a couple i have other plants of but the turb has brought me down though.

[Benjy]

This winter was unusual for me in that I had no losses at all (usually theres a couple)
and particularly because I also had a heating problem this year.
I keep my greenhouse heated to around 6C over winter, but had a thermostat failure this year, it was for one night only but the greenhouse did drop to 'zero', I was expecting some losses but surprisingly didn't get any.
I grow mostly Copiapoa.

[rodsmith]

I lost 8 plants altogether during the winter. All were in my conservatory which has a fan blowing air at ambient temperature and another that kicks in when it's cold, keeping a minimum of 3 deg.C. My situation is unusual, however, as most of the plants had been in dry, dark commercial storage from November 2015 until December 2016. Out of 170 plants I'm really relieved that only 8 have died. They were various cacti & a few other succulents. When I unpacked them after storage there were about a half dozen others that had dried out to a husk. The least affected seem to be the copiapoas, which don't seem to have minded being shut away for over a year and I wouldn't have known they had been without light and water for 13 months. I find copiapoas seem to thrive with very little water anyway and other growers have told me the same.

[Patrick]

I lost more plants this winter, since the big freeze winters of a few years back. But then I was in the UK and now I am in Portugal. It was my first full winter in Portugal and I lost going on for 20 plants. The losses could easily have been prevented but an unusually cold Portuguese winter (remember the news paper reports about lettuce shortages in the supermarkets etc?) which only means that it got down to -3 or -4c, combined with wet and naivety did for them. I don't have a greenhouse here and am growing most things outside with a bit of shelter when needed but really I was just caught on the hop. We'd had weeks of very light above zero frosts when it suddenly went colder. I lost some crassula's that had been grown outside unattended in a garden not far away from here for at least a decade but here they turned to mush. All my aeoniums were badly damaged and there is so far no sign of 'firecracker', 'velour' or arboreum variegata coming back to life. But worse was the loss of Agave's impressa, titanota, isthmensis medio picta alba, and titanota marginata. Even a couple of stenocactus.
Hopefully some will still come back to life but I shall be more careful in future.

[Chris43]

Again my situation is somewhat unusual, with my plants stacked in carry trays from mid November until mid March. I have moved 60 of 76 trays out of the garage, and at the moment I have had 14 losses, of which 6 are from what I would call compression damage - plants taller than the height of the carry tray to being the last tray on top of the stack.
Of the others, there isn't any obvious pattern. The trays were stacked up to 8 high, and though I had a 3kw heater in the garage, you're never sure how even the heat is distributed.
But 14 out of about 1600 plants so far isn't a disaster. There's only one plant I do really regret losing, a nice plant of M. tesopacensis Lau 618, the yellow flowered and quite rare form. That's one I will replace as soon as I can find one.