The Sacbee garden: Socks to rescue of freezing orange tree | The Sacramento Bee

Sacramento Bee readers share their gardening adventures.

Frosty nights bring out the ingenuity in local gardeners, faced with losing favorite plants or a precious backyard harvest.

Sacramento’s string of sub-freezing nights in early December had gardeners scrambling for ways to protect their citrus trees, succulents and other frost-tender plants.

Faced with a large orange tree loaded with almost-ready fruit, Jean Sadler came up with this solution:

“I was in my backyard (during the cold spell) about 7 p.m., covering my orange tree,” she said. “I was thinking about how I could protect the oranges that I couldn’t reach (and cover with sheets).

“My neighbor, Hamp, was talking in his yard and he said, ‘It’s cold enough to knock my sock off.’ My husband repeated it to me and I thought, ‘SOCKS!!’ I could cover each orange with a sock! It worked perfectly!”

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