Where I live, snow and ice is not a very common occurrence so we're really not prepared for it. Tomorrow a winter storm is headed our way .. sleet first and ice storm starting late Tuesday then snow all day Wednesday and it is forecast to only get to 32 degrees in the day on Wednesday with temps in the upper teens at night. After the power failure last week you can bet I'm freaking out! I just got finished reserving two 2000 watt gas generators .. I'll be picking them up tomorrow. So if the power goes out I'm covered for both greenhouses .. all I have to do now is dig a small tunnel under the main greenhouse to poke the power cords through. It's certainly taken a big worry off my mind! Hopefully I won't have to use them. Got my kerosene heater for the house and the nice thing about that is I can heat food on top of it.

How's everyone else in the Southeast preparing for this rare occurrence?

Here is a picture of my backyard when we got 6 inches of snow in February 2010. It barely lasted a day.

Just going to get cold her, Anne. The next three mornings are going to be in the mid-teens, but with the wind, the weather people are saying the wind chill will be lower single digits to -5 here in NE Mississippi. No snow or ice predicted. All that is suppose to hit the southern half of the state. They will have moist air coming up from the Gulf, colliding with the frigid cold from the north. Hopefully the five electric heaters in my two GH's and the three on my enclosed porch will all keep working and I won't have to resort to propane heaters. So far this year, and it has already been terribly cold for far too many days, the heaters have kept up and the temperatures have not gotten below 55 F. I have over 500 orchids and over 300 other tropical plants, so I have a lot to worry about.

I hope both of you can keep everything warm. Sounds like it won't be much fun. Down my way we are looking at 22 deg. for Wed. Am but no snow or ice. Heck it is so dry around here have almost forgot what moisture form the sky looks like. Keep warm.

Dang .. every time I listen to a weather forecast it gets grimmer and grimmer.

Winter Storm Warning for our area. We are on the fringes of the moisture line so maybe no snow. Lows for the next three nights 30º-24º-32º. I was going to prime up The Genny but didn't get home in time to do it. There are apt to be some power outages over the next two days due to the surge in power use. I sure would hate for my greenhouse plants be killed from a short power outage. Heater is on outside, everything is watered. Buckets of hot water will be in the greenhouse late tonight. Crossing my fingers for everyone that it won't be as bad as as they think.

Well for what it's worth, I'm ready to go .. got both generators set up in front of each greenhouse. If the power goes out all I'll have to do is plug everything in. At the moment they are covered in plastic shower curtains. If I have to use them then I'll put open patio umbrellas over them.

Good luck to everyone!

It sounds like you are all set for whatever comes your way. It was 14 F at 6:30AM, with a wind chill of 5 F! It started snowing around 8:00 AM but has now stopped. We may get some more snow this PM since our high is only supposed to be 24 F. Tomorrow AM will be even worse, with temperatures around 10 F and a wind chill around -5 F. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Welcome to the deep south, LOL!

We've just started getting sleet here. Gosh I'm hoping we don't lose power. At least I have a UPS on my computer that can run my modem and router for a couple of hours (not the main computer though) and use my laptop to keep up with weather reports if we lost power. I'd love the snow .. it's the ice that has me worried.

Anne, did you have power go out in the ice and sleet. I have family along the Ashley river area but haven't heard from in years, loved to visit with the Ashe and Waring's when we were small. That region is dear to my heart. Never did know of it ever getting snow?
I'm looking forward to a Carter and Holmes visit this spring! And I believe they have been offering nice begonias lately. I'm in the mid-South and ice storms come about every 5 to 10 years here, just enough time for everyone to forget how we survived the last one. One word. Generators!

Lol, I was just looking at a 5,500 watt generator online I'm probably going to buy .. it would run both greenhouses! I stayed up all night last night and thankfully the power didn't go out .. didn't even blink. Around 5am I was really having a hard time staying awake and thinking that there must be some kind of alarm you can plug into a wall socket that will beep if the power goes out and did a search and sure enough there is one which I'm definitely going to be buying next time I order from Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000IF8QDK/

Both greenhouses never got below 45 degrees. I finally went to bed at sunrise and set my kitchen timer to go off every 60 minutes - when it would go off all I had to do was check and see if the electric blanket was working then start the timer again .. an exhausting night to say the least and we're not out of the woods yet .. we never made it past 29 degrees today and there is still ice coating the branches and to make matters worse it looks like more freezing rain might sneak its way back inland from the coast tonight .. there is no way I can stay up all night again so I had a brain storm and realized that my uninteruptable power supply I have for my computers & peripherals would do the job as it starts beeping the minute the power goes off .. I'll do a hard shutdown of all the computers, modems and routers and put the UPS in the bedroom tonight. I'm keeping my fingers crossed it won't go off and I can get some sleep. Wish I had thought about this last night!

Sunday it's suppose to be in the 70's.

Boy you talk about stress! Anne, did you finely get some sleep? Hate to lose plants, but depending on what was in there you may have already lost some if it hovered around 45 for very long. My warm growers probably can take that but only for a short time. Praying for everyone in the ice zones!

Thankfully I was able to sleep uninterrupted the whole night last night and karma was good to me as well .. I returned the generators this morning and the store had been closed yesterday so I only had to pay for 1 days rental which was a blessing. I checked everything in both greenhouses today and nothing looks like it had a hard time .. even leaves flat against the greenhouse walls were ok! Gotta love that twin wall polycarbonate.

Probably the scariest part was driving this morning .. huge sheets of ice were flying off car roofs in one piece! The first time it happened I was far enough away from the other car so it hit the ground before I got to it. After seeing that I kept a good distance from other cars and it was happening a lot!

I know you Northern folks are probably laughing but you have to remember this is a very rare occurrence for us and we are totally unprepared!

Anne, I saw a segment on the weather channel from a bridge in your area with sheets of ice flying off and hitting the bridge! Beautiful, but so scary. So who would be out in that, there actually was a lot of traffic, maybe they needed to look up !

That was the Ravenel bridge that connects Charleston and Mt. Pleasant. When they closed the bridge because of all the ice, it caused some serious problems because instead of 10 minutes to get from Charleston to Mt. Pleasant (yellow line in picture) and vice versa the only alternate route took about an hour (pink line) which caused huge logistic problems for 2 days and put way more traffic on the highway than it was built for causing extreme 'parking lot' situations. Desperate to alleviate the problem they opened the bridge before all the ice had melted off the Ravenel and I'm pretty sure they weren't really thinking about ice that collected on the tension wires and such

What a beautiful bridge! I can't wait for my spring orchid trip, I will go up the coast this time. Take the long way, go to Savannah, Charleston then to Newberry, SC. Road trip!