Well, sorry. I have lived in Connecticut for over 12 years. I have many friend over there who do gardening. The expected spring frost date is mother's day for southern CT. It is usually better by the sound. But inland can get worse. So this should be no surprise. Here in GA, North Atlanta area we are expecting 41F tonight. Not quite near frost but very unseasonable. I have a suggestion for you to protect your plants: 1- If you have lots of leaves, pack around and over your plants and cover them with tarp or blankets etc. 2- In liue of leaves, get a lot of newspapers, separate them sheet by sheet and crumble them into fluffy balls and use them to pack around your plants,so that the air will be trapped and the weight of tarp will not damage the plants. Frost is not so bad. All you have to do is prevent cooling by radiation. But if you have freez, cold air will penetrate even through tarp and blanket. If you have just a few plants, you may cover them with empty pots. I would put a layer of newspaper inside them, for more protection.

Had our first frost last night. It killed off my annual begonias that had been blooming like crazy since May. It didnt bother my lantana. Some of the zinnia blooms got frost bit and lost all their color. I plucked all those off, but the rest of the plant looks good. The buds look good too. Under another frost advisory for tonight, but my county isnt mentioned. Then it is supposed to warm back up into the 40's to low 50's at night. I was at an eye appt. this morning, and the nurse was talking about this winter was predicted to be a bad one. I sure hope not as I just planted 40 TB irises this past Friday!!! Danielle

G.M., I didn't know her....only knew of her in terms of her being a relatively new firefighter with one of our county's fire departments (East Side VFD or Lake Murray VFD, I don't remember which one she had recently joined) and fighting her first house fire earlier on the day she died. You know how it is here....you may not know someone but you know people who know them, etc. House fires are few and far between, and one of our newer firefighters was also fighting his first housefire that same day, even though he's belonged to our department for many months now. I wasn't even there....I was home vacuuming and mopping floors because my sister-in-law was due to arrive from Pennsylania in just a couple of hours, although I had gone to the fire station and loaded up the firetrucks with drinks for the guys to take with them, and then spoke with several other Fire Rehab people by phone to make sure they had enough drinks, ice, coolers, etc. before I returned to my housecleaning. It was a pretty bad house fire that Sunday and they even cancelled church services at a church across the road and sent those folks home because of heavy smoke in the area and the risk of smoke inhalation. It was just a bad day. You don't give up....you pick your battles and something told you this year that it wasn't worth the fight. I understand that. With me, it is the severe drought periods that make me give up because there is just a point where you have to stop pouring water on the hard clay ground because it just runs off. I think it was luck for me this year, and being stubborn and refusing to give up, too. I do believe the fall harvest ends this weekend, because temps around 36 are now forecast for us on Mon. or Tues. night, and that's assuming Sun. night doesn't go that low. I've been watching the NWS, KXII, Weather Underground and Accu-Weather and trying to make sense of the various forecasts, and I've decided we probably are going to have our first freeze between Sunday and Tuesday. I've done the whole 'stripping the plants' of the 'final harvest' 4 or 5 different times already this fall when cool temps threatened, but I'll do it again Sat. or Sun. The coldest we've been here in our low-lying microclimate so far this fall has been 35 degrees and we had patchy frost and minor damage to the pepper and tomato plants, although the plants themselves did survive. I'm ready for it to end, though, because the holidays are almost here and I need to get busy with that. Our water bill was outrageous too during the dry spells, but here in Love County the rain rolled around just often enough to give me up and keep me going. If rain hadn't returned in September, though, I would have just quit watering because we couldn't handle another high water bill. When Tim and I drive by the long-ago-abandoned gardens in our area that haven't produced anything since roughly late July at the best, we are just amazed at the difference in our garden and those because ours still produces. It just goes to show you that if you can manage to water and get through the toughest dry spells of the summer, then you have a good chance at good fall production. I do think Love County consistently had more rain than Carter County this year, and I didn't realize how dry y'all had been until we went to Ardmore one day in August and I looked around as we were driving up I35 and realized y'all were looking really, really dry. Like you, I have plants in containers looking great for this time of year, and all the sunshine (and, LOL, attention to watering them regularly) has played a role in that. I think the cold may get them next week though. The whole breakup was so traumatic. Despite the fact that the former fiancee started dating his best friend, DS tried to be mature and remain friendly with them both (he handled the whole situation better than I would have!) but that didn't work out well either. It was VERY hard for us because Kristine was like a member of our family and we stayed in touch with her via the phone for a while, but it just was too awkward. Our new DIL is a jewel, and I hope this marriage lasts. We love her and her daughter dearly and just feel so blessed to have them as members of our family. I always tell people when unexpected things happen that "I think things work out the way they were meant to work out" even if we don't understand why at the time....so that's how I feel about this whole thing. It worked out the way God meant for it to work out. You have a wonderful weekend too! Dawn

I am glad I gave you guys and gals a good laugh! So I decided to take a picture of the car with all of the plants I put in it (the next day), but my husband decided to help me remove them, and I just didn't have the nerve to tell him to hold on because I want to take a picture! But that's not all folks, I didn't just pack up my husband's car (yes it is in the garage Jo---so double protection). I also stuffed my own van too! I did get a chance to take that photo the next day. Here it is: I just love those vans! And I kept thinking now if there is frost, then I should cover up with pots and sheets, and I did. But then I thought well "what about this one and that one, don't you have more pots?" And then I thought, what am I going to think in the morning when I see some plants frosted when I could have covered them up? Well, out I went again. As I said, us girls just got to do what we got to do! OK, I didn't get them ALL covered, but I tried.