Snow blanket, literally

The little white streaks are falling snowflakes.

Nice and chilly, of course, is how hardy trees need to be kept thru the winter. I went out this afternoon to check on my trees under "the rack." (For an earlier post on overwintering my hardy trees, click here.) There is a nice blanket of snow on top of the fabric cover, which, for non-bonsai friends and those in the tropics, is a good thing. Besides being an insulator in itself, snow reflects the sun's infrared rays, preventing them from heating up the space inside. That helps keep the trees safely dormant until spring.

Under the blanket.

The trees are doing fine. That's my yamadori ponderosa pine, my "pride and joy," in the left foreground. It was my 2010 Valentine's Day-birthday-anniversary gift from my lovely wife, and the tree would have been worth it if she had added Christmas in there too!

There was a reassuring smell of mothballs (naphtha) when I opened the cover at one end. That's one of the cat-food cans of mothballs, topped with gray tape and with holes in the sides, that's sitting on the ponderosa's soil on the other side of the trunk. This is the second year that I've used mothballs to repel critters that might like to snack on bark or foliage, and from all I can see, they do work. I have seen no signs of any chewing damage since I started using them.

Winter is getting serious here. The temperature, a little after 10:00 PM, is 12° F (-11° C;) tonite's low is forecast to be 1° F (-17° C.) The trees I keep outside are in absolutely no danger, but I'm thankful that I can keep them out of any wind.

What looks like "haze" or "graininess" is actually snow in the air.

We had 2-1/2 inches of snow today, with another 3-5 inches expected by sunrise Saturday. I got out with the camera and snapped a few shots.

On my daughter's favorite climbing tree.

On the branches of my bunjin Colorado spruce.