florida 2025-2026 Florida Winter

[kinzyjr]

56 minutes ago, HudsonBill said:

My yard is worse off today than it ever has been since living here..... the frost was insane thick ice on everything. I can already see the damage to to my royal and kings. 27 and no frost had 0bwffect on them 30 and frost nuked them. 

Wow!  I'm sorry to hear this!  I'm still scratching my head as to how there was ice or frost under tree canopy.  Did you get a lot of rain?

We were supposed to here, but only got a light mist.

[flplantguy]

32.9 on the tempest, small sensor in the open back 29.2. Frost on the buccaneer has me concerned, not sure on the rest. I also did not cover anything but will now for any inland freeze warning from now on since frost is common here. The rain on this coast never really dried up so frost formed easier I think.  Next one looks bad too for much of the south. I hate January.

[HudsonBill]

38 minutes ago, kinzyjr said:

Wow!  I'm sorry to hear this!  I'm still scratching my head as to how there was ice or frost under tree canopy.  Did you get a lot of rain?

We were supposed to here, but only got a light mist.

We had around a 1/4 inch of rain it rained pretty good for a bit. I think it was freezing fog. I woke up at 430 am and it was Foggy and 33 deg. Dropped to 30.6 soon after and was still Foggy but not as bad. 

[HudsonBill]

Coconut seems to handle frost better than a lot of other stuff. The bad damage on it was from 27 and 6+ hours below freezing last winter unprotected 

[flplantguy]

A lot of mine look good too but I'm seeing damage start on the buccaneer😔. That's disappointing since it's been struggling for a while but it's not bad yet.  I'll boost the fertilizer and water on it this summer.  Sun is out again thankfully so I'm planting a hedge of Simpson stopper for future windbreak, and fixing some weed mat that decided to try and blow away.

[Matthew92]

Got to 24 deg this morning. Heavy frost. 3rd time I've had this temps in the mid 20's. It's gotten below 30 quite a few times also. This is turning out to be quite a winter up here. 

[Merlyn]

On 1/17/2026 at 12:45 PM, kinzyjr said:

A very evenly distributed 40F-41F last night.  From reading some posts on other forums and social media, with verification from WUnderground and AmbietWeather.net, apparently I was very lucky.  Not far away, temperatures in the mid-to-upper 20s with heavy frost.  Another adventure starts overnight Sunday and looks like another front Wednesday, January 28th.  Time will tell. 

Yes, very lucky!  I hit 30.4F with snowlike heavy frost.  The frost started forming around 7-7:30 and got really heavy around 8:30.  It didn't start burning off until well after 9AM.  Unsurprisingly, about a mile SE from my house there was no sign of frost...   

[Matthew92]

[HudsonBill]

38 degrees at 730pm already..... I'll be in the mid 20s tonight easily. No freeze or frost warnings because most meteorologist have no clue

 

[Matthew92]

This is the time to watch especially. 

[kinzyjr]

29 minutes ago, HudsonBill said:

38 degrees at 730pm already..... I'll be in the mid 20s tonight easily. No freeze or frost warnings because most meteorologist have no clue

 

My area is under a cold weather advisory, but there will likely be a lot of frost in open areas tomorrow morning.

18 minutes ago, Matthew92 said:

This is the time to watch especially. 

It's looking like the 29th might be bad.

[Jimbean]

39F this morning. 

[HudsonBill]

Just like I thought. 29.8 as if right now and still dropping. Tonight ended up being the worst night of the year as in duration below freezing. The meteorogist fumbled like always. Forecast low was 35 ill end up at 28ish 

[flplantguy]

The forecast difference is really bad when it's off by this much so often. That's a choice to ignore since they have stations and see it. But heaven forbid they admit that part of their perfect paradise is not so perfect.  All the newcomers that ripped out their native trees for adonidias are going to be calling now about it since they didn't ask first about them and found out the hard way. Mine is still alive somehow under canopy, one of the bigger surprises.

[HudsonBill]

14 minutes ago, flplantguy said:

The forecast difference is really bad when it's off by this much so often. That's a choice to ignore since they have stations and see it. But heaven forbid they admit that part of their perfect paradise is not so perfect.  All the newcomers that ripped out their native trees for adonidias are going to be calling now about it since they didn't ask first about them and found out the hard way. Mine is still alive somehow under canopy, one of the bigger surprises.

Exactly! They know it gets this cold in this area and they ignore it. 

[malibu31]

On 1/18/2026 at 7:57 PM, Merlyn said:

@malibu31 generally I just fertilize in early spring and give the Alfredii a bit of extra Magnesium Sulfate.  When I forget the extra Magnesium they tend to get more yellow tips, though that's just a general observation and not experimentally true.  

The only real risk to Alfredii seems to be hurricanes and maybe crown rot.  After winter I just keep an eye on new spear movement.  As long as they are growing new spear slowly but regularly then they'll grow out of any cold damage reasonably fast.

I really appreciate these tips! As a first-time palm grower, it is tough to find information about a specific palm tree (I assumed it was similar across different palms but have learned different, like coconuts like salt, etc.) so this is super nice of you to share your experiences 

West Ocala has been COLD this winter. Alfies, Mules and Washies have taken several hits into the mid 20s with no sign of this weather slowing down. My cameras went down over the weekend so I'm flying blind, only eyewitness there can report the damage to me. They say they're still green, but I guess I would like like to see it myself. 

It plunged down to 28° once again - when will the nightmare end??

[flplantguy]

More proof to me the a declining la Nina is bad for us. Or a transitional winter between the two.  Leads to multiple small events instead of one or none.  Bad but not record setting seems to be the new pattern.

[kinzyjr]

Overnight lows were 37F-38F throughout the garden this morning.  There was no frost in the yard or in the other yards in the area.  There was some scant frost on the rooftops and on the back window of the car.  There is an extended cold period in the forecast at the end of this month and  into next month.

[Merlyn]

@kinzyjr around 9PM last night I rechecked the forecast from Wunderground...still 41F all night.  I thought to myself, "Self, it is unlikely that this is correct.  It's already 40F here at 9PM."  I went out and put boxes on my 2 already frost-damaged palms and I'm glad I did!  30.7F with medium frost that burned off by about 8:30AM.

[Merlyn]

3 hours ago, malibu31 said:

I really appreciate these tips! As a first-time palm grower, it is tough to find information about a specific palm tree (I assumed it was similar across different palms but have learned different, like coconuts like salt, etc.) so this is super nice of you to share your experiences 

West Ocala has been COLD this winter. Alfies, Mules and Washies have taken several hits into the mid 20s with no sign of this weather slowing down. My cameras went down over the weekend so I'm flying blind, only eyewitness there can report the damage to me. They say they're still green, but I guess I would like like to see it myself. 

It plunged down to 28° once again - when will the nightmare end??

Unfortunately it's probably going to be really cold next weekend too!  I had two warm winters back to back, with little to no damage to anything...even real tropicals.  This winter is making up for it, with Ficus Auriculata and a 35+ year old clump of Peace Lily burnt to a crisp.  Well...not a crisp.  More like a stinking pile of mush.  A lot of palms like Kings did great for a couple of years but are now 100% defoliated.  Hopefully the spears will grow out and look normal by late spring.  If not, my yard proves once again that it's a giant Darwinian experiment!

@kinzyjr maintains a great list of damage observations for hundreds of palm species.  I've contributed a bunch of observations to his list, as have probably a couple hundred other PTers.  If you are thinking about a new species in Ocala, you can check out the most recent post here:

 

[mnorell]

1 hour ago, Merlyn said:

Unfortunately it's probably going to be really cold next weekend too!  I had two warm winters back to back, with little to no damage to anything...even real tropicals.  This winter is making up for it, with Ficus Auriculata and a 35+ year old clump of Peace Lily burnt to a crisp.  Well...not a crisp.  More like a stinking pile of mush.  A lot of palms like Kings did great for a couple of years but are now 100% defoliated.  Hopefully the spears will grow out and look normal by late spring.  If not, my yard proves once again that it's a giant Darwinian experiment!

 

Merlyn, I wouldn't worry too much about your Ficus auriculata or your Spathiphyllum. I grew both of these when I lived in chilly (9a) Natchez, Mississippi, and Ficus auriculata would die back most years (typically lows in the low 20s with one to several hard freezes) and come roaring back from the roots in spring. I think it took the three solidly frozen days with lows of 18F in 2010 to finally kill it out. I also planted Spathiphyllum as a temporary/annual plant, thinking it was an ultra-sensitive plant. Lo and behold, was I surprised to see that despite the mush after a frost/freeze, it returned every year. I have in my notes from 2 April 2010 that "Spathiphyllum 'Giant Form' survived handily beneath the mulch and I removed the mulch and cleaned the plant, which has much growth, and leaves should be expanded in a week or so..." and also a note that all Spathiphyllum survived the 59-hour 2011 freeze, which bottomed out at about 22-23F for three nights in a row. I think with both of these where you are, a thick mulch of leaves is all you need to pretty confidently expect a return (that's usually what I provided mine with back in the day).

[Matthew92]

This post is not meant to alarm, only to demonstrate something. Yesterday there was some panic on X because the AIGFS model was showing an epic freeze for peninsular FL. While this was by far the coldest, other models did and still show the possibility of freezes down to Central FL. But if you look closely, this illustrates perfectly what has to happen to get a 1980's type freeze in FL. What needs to occur is the bowl of low pressure that comes down from the north has to dig in and amplify just to the northeast of around Jacksonville, FL so the winds flowing around it inject the cold air directly into the peninsula from the north. The lines around that dark blue area of low pressure are the direction the wind is driven (generally west to east). This is seen in the 500mb map attached below.

Now compare to the 12z run of the AIGFS model today. The bowl of low pressure is way up in the northeast and clearly doesn't pull that arctic air down into the peninsula.

It's not whether there's enough cold air coming south into the lower 48, It's a question of whether these high and low pressures will orient in a way to transport the cold air at the right angle down into the peninsula. If the bowl of low pressure sits on Alabama or Georgia the cold air blasts the FL Panhandle and then moves over the Gulf before going into the peninsula, and thus it gets moderated over the Gulf. That has been the pattern in recent years. However, lately these troughs of low pressure have oriented a little farther east lately and that is what's causing this recent cold weather in peninsular FL. 

Still need to watch though, because it's still far enough in time we don't know and on the same token some of the models leave room for the possibility of a digging trough to occur. This potential has been recognized by NOAA and the Climate Prediction Center as seen with the graphics I posted further up in this thread. 

[kinzyjr]

The hourly airport records for the last three days are attached as a ZIP file.

20260120_obhistory.zip

[Merlyn]

21 hours ago, mnorell said:

Merlyn, I wouldn't worry too much about your Ficus auriculata or your Spathiphyllum. I grew both of these when I lived in chilly (9a) Natchez, Mississippi, and Ficus auriculata would die back most years (typically lows in the low 20s with one to several hard freezes) and come roaring back from the roots in spring. I think it took the three solidly frozen days with lows of 18F in 2010 to finally kill it out. I also planted Spathiphyllum as a temporary/annual plant, thinking it was an ultra-sensitive plant. Lo and behold, was I surprised to see that despite the mush after a frost/freeze, it returned every year. I have in my notes from 2 April 2010 that "Spathiphyllum 'Giant Form' survived handily beneath the mulch and I removed the mulch and cleaned the plant, which has much growth, and leaves should be expanded in a week or so..." and also a note that all Spathiphyllum survived the 59-hour 2011 freeze, which bottomed out at about 22-23F for three nights in a row. I think with both of these where you are, a thick mulch of leaves is all you need to pretty confidently expect a return (that's usually what I provided mine with back in the day).

I'm sure with the hardiness you mentioned, both will grow back just fine.  The Peace Lily was planted by the original builder of my house, and it survived the 80s freezes!  It's under an overhang and just looks really horrible right now.  The Ficus have lost all the upper leaves, and the next lower set are all bronzed and wilted.  These have gone through ~25-26F and burned back to the roots, but came back really fast in the spring.  I'm guessing my "Autograph plant" (not sure which version it is) and seagrapes are similarly defoliated.  The seagrapes are around the same hardiness as the Ficus Auriculata so far, and also lost trunks but grew back from the roots.  The "Autograph plant" hasn't seen sub-freezing yet, so this will be a good test for it.

[JLM]

Its about to get downright cold out here.

Sunday night - 28F
Monday night - 22F
Tuesday night - 27F

Those numbers are from the NWS. Hopefully it doesnt drop anymore than that. Monitoring closely.

[OutpostPalms]

I’m not sure which is worse. High frequency of light to moderate freezes or one or two doozy freezes in an otherwise mild winter. Last year was infrequent severe freezes for me. This year is frequent lighter freezes. Sunday night will already have me matching the frost count from last winter but going by zones it’s a full zone warmer this year. 

[Jdash]

@Merlyn how are the more tropical zamias doing over there? (standleyi, nesophila, fairchild) and also how's the arenga hookeriana or other tropical species?

[Matthew92]

 

 

[Matthew92]

Moved further south

[kinzyjr]

2 hours ago, Matthew92 said:

Moved further south

I noticed my forecast lows for Monday went from 42 to 36 on NWS - a lot closer to the Weather.com forecast of 34F.  The rest of the days thus far are higher on NWS, but I'm not that optimistic at this point.

[Merlyn]

@kinzyjr they are saying lows of 35, 36, 40, 34, 36, 40 here, with highs around 55 to 65.  Given those estimates it may be several days around 30-34 for me, with frost likely every day.  Lots of stuff here is already mushy bronze.

@Jdash the Nesophila look pristine, under only partial cover.  Both are about 5 to 8 feet from the house, so I am sure fhat helps.  Furfuracea exposed are all 100% defoliated, but probably will grow back fine.  I'll have to go look at the others, I don't recall what they looked like when I was wandering around the yard yesterday.  Most are under heavier cover than in past years, so I expect they will be in ok condition.  The frost was a bigger hazard to those plants than just cold temps.  But my absolute low this year was also about 27.5 compared to 24.6, which could be the difference between minor and heavy damage.

The Hookeriana look nearly pristine, with just some brown spots but no significant burn.  The Autograph plant and Seagrapes are both torched on the upper exposed leaves but fairly clean below.  Ficus Auriculata are both torched top to bottom.  Kings are 100% burnt.  I'll have to do a full inventory this weekend before next week's front.

[kinzyjr]

18 minutes ago, Merlyn said:

they are saying lows of 35, 36, 40, 34, 36, 40 here, with highs around 55 to 65.  Given those estimates it may be several days around 30-34 for me, with frost likely every day.  Lots of stuff here is already mushy bronze.

Currently, the NWS is a little more favorable than Weather.com.  At this point, we'll see what happens and live with the results.  There are some tattered fronds here, but nothing near death yet.  After this mess, that could change.

 

[FlaPalmLover]

My foxtail ended up sustaining some mild burn/brown spots but still looks solid. There's a possible low in the high-20s in the forecast for next weekend, so it will be interesting to see how it does. My king palm is still doing fairly well as it is under canopy. I haven't driven past the coconut that's not too far away to see how it's handling everything yet.

[OutpostPalms]

Forecast looking rough Monday and Tuesday morning. Sunday pretty crazy. High is 62 low is 24. So much for my 9B winter hopes. Good news is the temps later in the week are trending higher which is outstanding because I’ll be out of town! 

[JLM]

NWS now forecasting 19F for Monday night.

[SubTropicRay]

This is trending in the wrong direction.

reposting for educational purposes.  Translate as you see fit for your area.