It's so typical for Coloradans to start enjoying our trees, perennials and bulbs blooming and our early spring vegetables growing, and getting the sprinkler system fired up, and then we get snow, or at least the forecast for snow.

Fort Collins is a under a winter weather advisory starting at noon Monday. The National Weather Service is predicting as much as 6 inches of heavy, wet snow, most of which is expected to fall at night when the low is expected to reach 31. 

With that in mind, here are some tips on how to protect your landscape during the brief interlude of snow and cold so you can once again enjoy them when our temperature returns to the 70s for the weekend.

Sprinkler system

If you fired up your sprinkler system, you should be fine. Low temperatures will hover around the freezing mark the next several nights. But it takes sustained colder temperatures to damage your system. As an extra precaution, you can cover your vacuum breaker outside your house with a blanket and tarp or quick drain your system.

Blooming bulbs and perennials

If your tulips, daffodils and hyacinths are looking good and you want to keep the bloom going, create protection from the heavy snow by putting tomato cages at various places along your bulb bed and then put blankets, drop cloth or tarps over the cages. This allows the snow to cascade off the protection and save your blooms from the snow. For individual plants, use 5-gallon buckets, large planter pots, large cardboard boxes with plastic covering them to prevent the cardboard from becoming wet and plastic storage bins.

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Fortunately, trees should be fine since most have only recently begun to leaf out. If we get 6 inches of wet snow and you want to brush the snow off your deciduous or evergreen tree branches, use a broom to push up on the branches rather than pull down the branches.

If you have a crabapple, ornamental pear or any other tree putting on a blooming show now, there is little to save the blooms if we get that much heavy, wet snow. It's one of the few downfalls of living in Colorado.


Your cool-season vegetables will weather the cold. But if they are tall enough, the heavy snow could damage them. Protect taller veggies the same way you protect bulbs.



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