Protecting this azalea was a real challenge the past couple of nights. I started out bringing one king sized bedsheet to put over it yesterday afternoon. That barely covered a quarter of the plant! So back I went in search of old sheets and clips to hold them together.
I put three more king size sheets on top of the plant and thought that would do the trick. But when I went out to check it after dinner, the sheets had all blown off the plant. So I covered it up again and found a few cinderblocks down behind the house to weigh down the sheet corners and stop them from blowing off.
Right before bed I went out in my slippers and found that the wind had popped off the clips and blown the sheets off again. So back in the house I went and found two more bedsheets. This time I overlapped all the sheets by a foot or so, and then I placed two wrought iron side tables on top of the plant. They were just heavy enough to hold the sheets down but not so heavy that they broke any branches or hurt the plant. It looked ridiculous but it saved my beautiful azalea from the freeze.
