Baby, It's Cold Outside

We've got an Inside Slider, a dip in the jet stream that comes down the front of the Sierra Nevada, bringing us cold Arctic air and it's really making SoCal miserable. It snowed in Reseda, for example. Our lows are going to be in the teens up here in the High Desert and our highs are below 40 degF.

I've got to scamper out into our entry and rescue my sansevierias. I don't know whether to leave them out there and cover them or to bring them up by the door (close to the house and away from the open) or to put them out on the west-facing patio surrounded by leaky sliders or actually bring them into the house. I've got five or six of them, ranging from $7.99 supermarket specials to a Blue Bat I spent $50 for. It's the Blue Bat I'm worried most about, because it's got a fat rigid leaf and is exceptionally slow growing. It's S. halli "Blue Bat", which you can see here, not quite halfway down the page. Interesting, isn't it? Mine has three leaves now, triple the number it had when I got it.

Sansevierias are the perfect house plant for absent-minded owners like me. They're extremely robust and can stand infrequent and irregular watering. Down at the Palm Desert house I have about a dozen planted along the side of the house. They do very well there, as they can tolerate the heat if well-watered and it almost never freezes. I hadn't wanted to plant out my favorites until I saw how the others did, so I ended up bringing them up to the High Desert for, I thought, the summer. However, when my mother's cancer was diagnosed we decided not to go south for the winter and the plants are roughing it.