Should I ice them?

I'm in central TX and the temps have dropped to the 40's. But in this area the temp can spike back up for a week at a time and then drop again.

I had them climbing my fence and they were planted in 5gl buckets. Someone at my nursery suggested trimming them back putting them in the garage with a piece of burlap wrapped dry ice in each bucket to make sure they maintain a freeze.

Thoughts? Ideas? First time planted here.

Obviously, the best two choices would be:

1. Move yourself and the hop plants to the Northern US
2. Put the buckets in your walk-in cooler/freezer
3. Mail them to a relative in the northern US for the winter.

If these aren't an option, you either need to get creative or not care. You could move them to the garage and dry ice them but that may get expensive and/or dangerous. Either, you are constantly replacing the dry ice or you get it so well insulated that the hop plant makes it down to -109F...the temperature of dry ice. You could use normal ice, but now you are really spending a lot of time replacing ice.

While its true the cold break is good, you can get away without it. It will hurt productivity and such but its what they do in San Diego and elsewhere. I would just plan on cutting all the bines off that have sprouted in sometime late Feb or early march.

By the way, I'm not kidding about the cooler. To push our plants for propagation we actually ake small plants at certain times of the year and run them into cold storage so they think its winter time.

Planting them in the ground(rather than in pots) and mulching heavily with dry leaves or straw would make them less suceptable to a week or 2 of warm weather. It dosnt take long for a 5 gal bucket of soil siting in the sun to warm up, but the ground soil temp a couple inches below the surface is slow to change.

If this is not an option, moving the pots against the north wall of your house(in full shade), will keep them a little cooler.