This weekend we are to hit -3 ºC (27 ºF) in my town, in my orchard i have lots of cherry, apricot, almond blossoms, most of them still in flower, others are the size of a bean.
It seems that putting water near the trees, protects them since for every grade, 4,18 cal/gr of heat are released to the surrounding air, yet i'd like to take a step further and water the trees with hot water, around 40 ºC (104 ºF), would anyone comment on this approach? Most trees are 3 years old, so not that big.
There's really no literature about watering with hot water, but I would expect that watering the trees with water that hot would quickly kill them because it would severely damage or out-right kill the feeder roots near the soil's surface.
When in doubt I tend to go with the most natural approach possible. Lets imagine these plants are growing in the wild. Does hot water rain on winter? No, it does not. Therefore, simply use cold water (but sparsely as winter tends to be dry season, depending on where you live)
