Maybe if I garden long enuf, I'll figure it out! Just a few years ago, we had a very cool, wet, windy spring. Melons died and the squash & cucumbers did very poorly even after it warmed up with a fairly normal summer. Tomatoes came on to have a bumper crop! This year, we had a very cool, wet, windy spring. The cucumbers are wound up for what looks like a tremendous crop! Melons and squash are doing okay. Tomatoes? There are barely a few . . . Posted by oldroser Best pole bean of all is Fortrex . . . I think it was 'roser who convinced me to try Fortex about 10 years ago. I know that a number of others have greatly appreciated that variety. Not to my taste but they may have had a productive season despite that. (Should probably know better than to argue with 'roser, tho'. ;o) The beans here aren't having the bestest of years, either! Still, the bush beans I usually grow did just okay, seem to have survived harvesting and should come back for a 2nd crop. Another chance should allow them time to grow a little! I have grown (what might be) Oregon Giant since that swing and miss with Fortex. I like the flavor and appreciate the size and long season. This year, I tried something different and planted them in mid-July . . . they'll have to hurry and are spiraling up their teepee. I'll just have to see. At least, they missed having that difficult June to beat them up. Steve

Well, no point in getting in a pissing match about this...I'm sure you are honestly reporting what you saw. OTOH, I can assure you that in the 1994 winter, the 2 big trees on the campus of W&M had no visible damage after 0F. I was definitely looking for it; I even have pictures of the damage to the Trachys planted not far away. (some brown fans, but ones that caught insulating snow still being partly green) This was a period so cold the Potomac north of DC froze solid enough to walk from VA to MD. Even down in Williamsburg, the pot-smoking rebel in our dorm, on a dare, walked out about 25' on an icy coastal pond (brackish water!) without it cracking. Ornamental fountains at fancy hotels were frozen solid. So, very cold...as cold as anything the greater metropolitan PNW can muster. They were wind sheltered by large buildings, in a place that isn't terrible windy anyhow. That could have helped. As I've mentioned before, one has since been severely damaged by a hurricane, as they grew above the shelter of those buildings. (isn't terribly windy, except during hurricanes haha) Clearly the northernmost on the east coast, at the Barnes, has survived several winters that went well below 0F. BUT I've made no secret of my finding a book from the 1940s about Philly area gardens, that said 5 out of 6 tried in prominent public collections, had died by the time of publication. And even that tree is not still around; the Barnes tree is from much later. No way to know without hours of tedious and perhaps impossible primary source investigation, but I have a hunch the winter of 1934 might have been to blame...a candidate for the mid-Atlantic's coldest winter of the 20th century. Perhaps the droughty dust bowl summers of that period were also a problem. So I'm not by any means recommending any normal Joe or Jane Q Public, try to grow these on the east coast.

Thanks Dave. As I am freezing them I will go a head and it do both ways, just to be sure. Harvest the ones that are hard and let the rest stay on the vine until the vines are dead. I wasn't sure if the plants died from disease or insects if I would end up with any harvest. Wish I had a place to store them, but I can't even store onions and potatoes for more than a few weeks. Looking into that for next year if I can have a garden again. Thanks again.

If you can increase the pitch of the roof, you might get some run-off, esp since you live near the coast. And it isn't like you NEVER get rain... one inch of rain on a 1000 sq ft house equals 83 CUBIC FEET of water, or 3 cubic yards of the stuff, if I've done my math right. 1 gallon of water = about 200 cu. inches, so 1 cu. ft. of water should equal about 8 2/3 gallons. So, that 83 cubic feet of water from the 1000 sq ft roof would come to almost 718 gallons of water from one inch of rain. Visualize 24 of your 30 gallon garbage cans full of it, or 13 55-gal drums. That would water a few veggies & flowers, wouldn't it? Rainwater is probably one of America's most under-used resources. And it's free! Sue