Cindo ...
Yes, I remember your writing about the winds a while back ...or I think it was you ...
I moved up here from San Diego and had never experienced a winter in the mountains. I was gifted with over 100 roses which I potted up because I was too busy that year handling the deferred maintenance that came with the house.
Yeah, I was worried about the cold. That's when I came up with the idea of big clusters. I tied the bags of mulch around the clusters with twine. It was cheap and it worked ...
It turns out that it is the heat of summer that causes more plant stress than the cold in my zone. However, I still worry about plants in containers. I haven't lost any plants, but I just can't seem to convince myself not to worry about them.
You don't need to worry about your wood mulch being a fire hazard, but may want to take a look at ladder fuels. A few years ago, I got all of my neighbors together and we had a CalFire crew come out and do fuel reduction work on all of our properties. I asked one of the crew members about my mulch and that is when he explained what firefighters call "The rule of four." To summarize, if the fuel for the fire is two feet tall, the flames would be eight feet tall. He told me that my mulch was two inches, so the flames from the mulch would be eight inches ... easily managed.
There are a lot of articles about firescaping on the Internet and you can learn more by visiting those sites. The best defense for any structure is the correct selection of foundation plantings and trees. I don't need to worry about my maple tree because it is a hardwood tree and those take a long time to catch fire. I do have to make sure it is properly limbed, which is true for all of the trees up here because we live in a wildfire area.
I am going to have to prune back the junipers on my slope because they are not fire safe. If they caught fire, they would not cause a problem for my home as fire travels up hill and my house is down below the slope, but would be more of a hazard to the neighbor who lives above me. I am not looking forward to that task, but it has to be done. If they still have the fuel reduction program, I might be able to get the work done for me for free. I'll be looking into it this week.
Smiles,
Lyn
