Its that humidity!

  I don't know if it is or not.  The humidity thing always seems to get in the way when discussing the weather.  If it feels hot in the summer, it is because there is high humidity.  If the temperature feels colder in the winter, it is that high humidity once again.  Sometimes this just does not make a lot of sense to me.  If I am hot, I am hot and the same goes for when I am cold.  I tried asking a few questions about it and the answers all assured me that humidity does, indeed, cause changes in the way we "feel" temperature.  Moist air in the summer time can make us hotter simply because the air cannot absorb our sweat (which is a type of cooling called evaporative cooling!).  Air can only hold so much water and if there is already a bunch floating around out there, our sweat stays with us instead of cooling us.  In winter, since the air has so much water in it during high humidity type days, it takes more of our body heat to warm the space around us.  Thus, heat is actually pulled away from our bodies at a more rapid rate making us feel a lot colder. Whew!  Did you know all of that?  I did not!

The grapefruit trees after the last freeze.

One lone grapefruit hangs defiantly after the last freeze!

  Now, since it all of this has to do with how our bodies react to humidity and temperature, I wondered if the same was true for plants....and I still wonder.  I have no answers.  The reason that I am so curious about this is last year we had ice storms with the temperatures down in the teens.  Yes, my citrus trees froze or at least their leaves did. During the springtime, the trees came back in full force.  (All except for the lemons and limes...they are quite dead!)   I can't say much about that, though.  I expected the trees to freeze with temperatures in the teens.  What surprises me is the fact that, once again, my poor trees have met with a traumatic winter!  We have had several nights dip into the twenties (not teens) and the trees have lost their leaves.  The only real difference beside temperature is the humidity.  The recent cold nights that had temperatures in the mid-twenties were clear with very low humidity.  So did temperatures in the teens with high humidity feel colder to the trees than the temperatures in the mid twenties with low humidity?  Both froze my trees.  Pop always used to want cloudy nights when the temperatures would be forecast to drop below freezing.  He claimed that the clouds would form a "blanket" and keep the plants warmer.  I have stuck with that theory with my garden and it seems to be working.  So...higher humidity keeps things warmer or colder?  Or do I just need a nice warm blanket of clouds to protect my plants? Me....I blame it on that humidity!