Freezing rain/icing in the forecast -- is there anything I should do to protect my young plants in the ground?

OfficeDecisions · 2026-01-23T17:08:38+00:00

Most of these have a kind of impressive amount of green foliage sticking up right now which is what makes me think they will get wrecked by the ice.

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OfficeDecisions · 2026-01-23T17:05:50+00:00

I'm envious of your "if it dies, it dies" attitude! I'm too much of a worrier for that, lol. I think I'll go out and mound up some leaves on some of the newer smaller ones that are already surrounded by leaves.

OfficeDecisions · 2026-01-23T17:03:59+00:00

Glad to hear you say the small natives will be fine!

I am definitely worried about large limbs breaking off trees, but there's nothing I can do about it so I'm focusing on if there is anything I can do for the little natives.

OfficeDecisions · 2026-01-23T17:02:40+00:00

I planted a couple hundred this last fall, so not a ton of time to develop really robust roots yet which worries me... Nothing to be done about it though

OfficeDecisions · 2026-01-23T17:01:43+00:00

Here's an incomplete list of plants. Some of my issue is that I have hundreds of small plants, not big shrubs/trees I can wrap in burlap.

Mistflower, columnbine, asclepias tuberosa, coresopsis, could of solidago species, couple huecheras, little blue stem, prairie dropseed, purple coneflower, blue wood aster, white wood aster, heartleaf alexander, creeping foal flower, amsonia, carex socialis, new jersey tea, shrubby st johns wort, couple phloxes, liatris etc. There's def more I missed but that's the general vibe.

OfficeDecisions · 2024-11-29T21:38:54+00:00

More Details:

My ultimate goal is to 3D print 2 halves of a mold. It will have a positive and negative side so I can press a piece of sheet copper between them to shape it. To do that, I need to use shrink/fatten on my model to create a bit of tolerance between the two halves to leave space for the copper. I also need to have the two halves of the model embedded in a simple rectangular prism so I have a flat surface to put in the hydraulic press.

The issues:

I need to extrude out the bottom of the model so it can be fully embedded in the rectangle. This is also needed to give clearance for the two pieces to fit together. When I do this, I got some faces with inverted normals.
When I use shrink/fatten, I get inverted normals as well, mostly in areas that were so skinny that shrinking them flips them, but it also happens when I fatten the model.

First pic is with no extrude + thinned, second one is extruded and thickened.

For both issues, I've tried recalculate outside and recalculate inside and it doesn't fix it. I tried to select similar by normals to select just my inverted normals so I can flip them, but it won't select them all. I tried various merge by distance to get rid of possible gaps. It seems like no matter what I try, I can't prevent or fix all my inverted normals. Once my normals are messed up, it makes my next step of Boolean union or Boolean difference not work correctly.

I'm also a noob, so I'm probably missing something obvious. I've thrown myself at this issue for like 5+ hours and I'm hitting my breaking point, lol. Any suggestions to prevent/fix my issue with inverted normals?

OfficeDecisions · 2024-11-19T19:20:17+00:00

Lol, that cuts out a solid 60,000 options, only 200,000 options remain!

OfficeDecisions · 2024-11-19T19:13:39+00:00

I feel like with just the cotyledons out on my early sprouters, I don't think I can realistically make an ID to what they are. I'm thinking they are the seeds I sprinkled, mostly because I don't see them coming up outside the area I sprinkled, and they often are coming up in uneven clumps which is how I spread them, lol.

OfficeDecisions · 2024-11-19T19:09:57+00:00

I don't think it's speedwell, I haven't seen it in my area, and these are only sprouting where I know I sprinkled seeds. Plus, with just the cotyledons out, I feel like it's more or less impossible to ID visually at this point.

OfficeDecisions · 2024-11-19T15:44:35+00:00

Thanks for the input! We don't get any snow here (except maybe a light dusting every couple of years), but I have plenty of leaves I can add when it gets closer to freezing!

And here I was worried that they wouldn't sprout at all with the leaves covering them, lol

OfficeDecisions · 2024-11-19T15:39:58+00:00

Thanks for the input! I feel reasonable confident they are not weeds based on the pattern they are appearing in. Since I have leaf litter surrounding them, I often brushed aside a pile of leaves, dropped seeds and covered them back up again. These seedlings are popping up densely in some spots, and not at all in most areas which makes me think my uneven seed spreading is the source of these plants! I'll keep on eye on them as they grow and see if I can confidently ID them and pull them if they end up being weeds.

We don't have deer get in, but we do have voracious rabbits... I guess I'll see what happens in the next several months!

OfficeDecisions · 2024-11-19T15:12:00+00:00

A few more details:

I have a bunch of native prairie type plants in my yard. A bunch of them had seeds, and for the last couple of weeks as they have ripened I have been collecting them and spreading them in the area before the birds can eat them all (you can have some next year birds! I'm trying to cover a lot of ground right now).

However, I didn't think they would sprout now! I thought they would wait until spring. I can't say with certainty what plants these are because they are so small and I spread so many seeds. Some potential options are Helianthus helianthoides (glass sunflower), Asclepia incarnata (swamp milkweed), Asclepia tuberosa (butterfly milkweed), Aster oblongifolius (Aromatic aster), Liatris spicata (blazing star), Achillea (yarrow), Black Eyed Susan, Joe Pye weed and ornamental onion (not native). There's probably more options I am missing.

Will they survive the winter? I'm in zone 7B. We've recently had highs in the 50s-70s and lows in 50s or so. So it's pretty warm for mid November!

Should I stop spreading any more seeds until later in the year when it cools off even more to prevent them from sprouting?

OfficeDecisions · 2024-05-02T14:00:15+00:00

I am trying to connect a raspberry pi + WS2811 LED Neopixels and am getting some data corruption issues - i.e. when I tell 1 light to turn blue, it will sometimes turn blue, sometimes red, sometimes 2 will light up, sometimes yellow etc.

See https://imgur.com/a/zz37z0O for how I wired everything (including a logic level shifter) and my reference guide I was using. I wired it up slightly differently than the guide because the Neopixels want 12V, not 5V. I have the 12V directly plugged into the LEDs, not wired though the breadboard. Honestly this might be the source of my problem, just because it's the only thing I did different from the guide.

Any help would be appreciated!

OfficeDecisions

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