Check the plants or bulbs to ensure they will thrive in zone four. Use larger containers, (e.g., minimum 14-inch diameter), and have two plus inches of mulch in each one. Use anything handy to create a wind break, and keep the containers bunched together. My containers are out 7 by 24 but we're in zone six. Good luck.

So far this Spring/Summer has been a treat temperature wise with no excessively hot readings but all that is about to change starting tomorrow. Next couple of days are supposed to be upper 90's to 100 degrees. Precipitation this entire year has been utterly pathetic however with every month being below average to way below average. No big gully washers have visited here unlike much of the southeast.

I always have leaves on daffs before blooms, what is confusing me is the iris. I have tiny dwarf irises that ALWAYS bloom first. So far I've had tons of blooming crocus, one daff is fully out, and the ogon spirea is about to bust wide open. Yes, I suspect we may have some more frosts to come, however this is not all that unusual. I have the Gardening 'Round Atlanta book and it gives a short history of the author's garden - she mentions some very early springs in some years, also some frosts after "spring" has sprung.

Maybe the white round radish y'all are thinking of is the variety called Hailstone. (If ever there was an appropriate name for a radish in our state, Hailstone would be it.) And, just to show that whoever names varieties has a sense of humor, there's a long, pointy white radish named Icicle too. Alexis, Those poor tomato plants! Maybe it was all those changes over a few days that stressed them more so than the neem. When hardened-off plants go back indoors after already being outside for some time, they can lose some of their hardening-off. I know I had that happen with some pepper, flower and herb seedlings while they were hardening off. I think I already had most all the tomato plants in the ground by then. I battle spider mites every year. They are everywhere here in our rural area, and the hotter and drier it is, the worse they are. I started seeing them on some plants back in March. March! It used to be that they wouldn't reach high enough population levels for me to worry about them until July....and gradually it became May....and now that I am resigned to seeing them in May, they arrived in March. Here in this state, you never know with tomatoes. Sometimes we get periodic "cold fronts", which bring us slightly cooler weather, even in the middle of summer and we can get fruit set at that time. If a cold front is coming that will put temperatures back into the right range for fruit set, I'll buy some Super Bloom or another brand of a bloom-booster fertilizer and feed it to the plants about 5-7 days before the expected arrival of the cold front to ensure they are in bloom when the cold front arrives. When I have done that in some previous years, I got great fruitset even if that cold front only brought us temperatures in the right range for a couple of days. I saw something interesting at the Ardmore Wal-Mart a couple of days ago. The way retail usually works is that tomato plants in six-packs are common in March here, but as we move into April, the tomato plants are in increasingly larger containers, as people buying them later want larger plants to make up for the fact they are planting later, right? Right now, I am seeing half-grown tomato plants with almost full-sized fruit in roughly 3 gallon containers in stores....for about $20-25 per plant. A couple of days ago, though, the Ardmore Wal-mart had six-packs of tomato plants with plants that are maybe 4-5" tall. Irrationally, I wanted to buy some. Being rational most of the time, I didn't do it. I cannot imagine that anyone buying tomato plants that small and putting them in the ground now would get any fruit from them until fall.....and that would be strongly dependent on daytime and nighttime air temperatures at the time they finally got large enough to blossom. This is sort of an awkward time to plant tiny tomato plants---too late to consider them part of the spring planting but too early to plant them for fall. Still, I bet lots of people will buy them, especially if their spring-planted tomatoes have major issues. Some years I don't aim for keeping plants alive all summer. Some years I just keep them going as long as I can, and then I cry "uncle" and surrender to the summer and stop watering. You'd be amazed what might survive even after you cut off the water. In 2011, Piricicaba broccoli at the shady west end of the garden survived at least 6 weeks in July-August with no irrigation and probably no rainfall. I didn't even realize it was still alive until maybe October or November, and there it was producing! I had been gone to wildfires day and night and night and day all summer, and after I stopped watering in July, I really didn't step foot in the garden. When I went back into it after the wildfire activity dropped after rain returned in September, I found I had broccoli to harvest. It was just bizarre. Despite it seeming all wrong, we harvested broccoli from that Piricicaba until the plant froze in December. So, sometimes gardens just surprise us, and in the oddest of ways. I hope the forecasts of the return of El Nino come true. I almost always have a great garden in El Nino years because we get plentiful rainfall those years. Dawn