Well, then why in the world did they cancel a Winter Weather Advisory scheduled to last through 4 p.m.? Maybe computer gremlins ate it. I'd say I'm jealous of the snow y'all are receiving, but...hee hee...I am so NOT jealous. I've already had my fill of snow for this winter and doubt it is done with us yet. Glenda, I hope your son makes it safely in this weather. Mandy, I guess the kids are excited about the snow. Ick. I hate all the mess of wet boots and socks and gloves and coats, etc. Now I know why my mom was never as thrilled about the snow as we kids were on the rare occasions that Fort Worth received enough snow to cover the ground. Have y'all looked at your overnight low temps for the latter half of the week? Some marginally hardy plants may be in a world of hurt. Mulch, mulch, mulch! Dawn

Jay, Our rain started sometime after 4 p.m. and it isn't falling at a very hard rate, but that's OK with me. We're still on rain overload from 2009. I hope you get a lot of rain the next few days/weeks. I do think it is the El Nino effect and, you know, they forecast a moderate El Nino but we ended up with a strong one.....although Wunderground's Dr. Masters says the water temps have dropped just enough now that it is considered a moderate El Nino at the present time. Our weather here in Marietta was goofy in January, but it all averaged out to 'normal'. LOL Our very cold temps the first 10 days or so of January were offset by highs up to 20 degrees above average during the latter part of the month. Today we had oodles and oodles of birds at the feeders after not having many the last couple of days. I refuse to think too hard about what that means! Dawn

Reed, I am sorry the weather is being so hard on your plantings. Some years the weather is like this and some years it isn't. You learn to read the signs around you and plant/not plant accordingly. To me, one of the big clues for this year's planting season actually was last year's planting season. We were very warm very early last year. I put tomatoes in the ground about 2.5 weeks before my average last frost date and got away with it. That only happens once or twice a decade at our house, and never in 2 consecutive years---so I knew there was no way I'd get to plant them early this year. I waited and planted my seeds at the proper time instead of starting them early like I did last year. That helped a little bit but what helped the plants even more was that I moved the tiny plants out to the unheated greenhouse when they had only two true leaves so they would grow on at much cooler nighttime lows than they would have in the house. This helped keep the plants smaller and more manageable for a bit longer. It would seem counter-intuitive to do something to slow them down and keep them small but I have learned to do that in colder springs so that the plants and I aren't totally insane in mid-April when the cold weather refuses to go away and stay away. I also watch my trees and observe how quickly or slowly they are leafing out. The best tree, in terms of signaling that it finally is warm enough to plant, is a native pecan tree that sits to the immediate west of our veggie garden. It is not foolproof---even this tree occasionally gets frosted after it leafs out, but only about once every 5 years. If I put plants in the ground after it leafs out, they usually are OK. This year? That pecan tree still looks like it is mid-winter and I haven't put a tomato plant in the ground yet. I also have a couple of burr oaks near the house that are almost as reliable as the pecan tree. They are just now starting to flower. If you will watch trees in your yard and neighborhood over the years, they'll help you decide when to plant (or not to plant) the way my trees help me. To help your plants get through the late cold spell, you can use Wall-O-Water devices, floating row cover (the newest ones can give plants 10 degrees of plant protection), low tunnels made of PVC pipe or electrical conduit, etc. and you can put a heat source in the low tunnels. My favorite heat source is cat litter buckets or jugs filled with water to serve as solar collectors. I have saved every one of those we've bought since moving here and have quite a collection of them. I keep them stacked in the garage when not in use and they last for many years before they get old and brittle and crack. With buckets of water acting as solar collectors combined with floating row covers or low tunnels of 4 or 6 mm plastic suspended over hoops, I have gotten warm-season plants through temperatures as low as 19 degrees and have gotten cool-season plants, most of which will tolerate light frosts but not hard freezes, through nights with low temperatures as low as 9 degrees. All these techniques are things I learned to do after moving here because in Texas we generally did not have so many late cold spells. Even with everything I have done to slow down the tomato plants, they are now at the point where I need to either plant them or pot them up to larger containers. I likely will plant them sometime in the next 3 or 4 days and then will use buckets of water next to them as solar collectors and row covers over them if next week's cold spell arrives as expected. I never consider my plants "safe" from a late frost or freeze until after May 4th because we have had a late freeze or frost on May 3 or 4 at our house for 4 of the last 6 years, or maybe it is for 5 of the last 7 years. The key to success here with our spring cold fronts is to not let yourself get tricked by 70, 80 or even 90-degree weather in Jan-April. Early warm spells rarely last and very rarely mean the cold is truly over for the season. Spring weather in OK is usually a wild roller coaster ride until at least early May. That does not mean we cannot plant until then but it does mean we have to cover up plants every now and then. Watch the behavior of southern OK gardeners like Busy1 and like me . If we are not putting tomato plants in the ground down here, that is a sign that people further north of us shouldn't be putting their plants in the ground early either unless they plan to go to extraordinary lengths to protect them. I know that market growers have to take those risks because there is a big advantage to having the first ripe tomatoes at the market. For home gardeners it is not so necessary to put plants in the ground early. It is a sad truth that you can put tomato plants in the ground in late March and in late April in the same year and by late May or early June, the plants put into the ground in late April will have caught up to the plants put into the ground in late March about 9 years out of 10. Dawn

We didn't have a freeze warning or a frost advisory or anything here in Love County but I never trust the forecast lows here in April. I brought in all the seedlings and had nothing in the ground that could freeze. At the last minute when it was nearly dark, Tim and I covered up the lettuce with a frost blanket because our temperatures were dropping more quickly than I thought they should. I know from experience that a forecast low of 34 here often means we'll actually see 30, 28, 26 or 24. Or worse. Our Forecast Low: 34 Our Actual Low: 26 At almost 4 a.m., the Fort Worth office of the NWS issued a Frost Advisory for the counties across the river from us. I hope the gardeners in those counties covered up their tender plants last night. I was prepared. Our local CBS TV meteorologist said on the evening news that he thought many parts of our area could go below the forecast low and even down into the 20s and that there would be some "patchy frost". By then, I'd already brought everything inside, but his words helped convince me to cover up the lettuce. I know it can take very cold weather, but it has had such hot weather (upper 80s and 90s) that I wasn't sure how much cold it would tolerate. I expect that my baby peaches and plums froze and will start dropping from the trees. With the strawberries and blackberries that are blooming, I think it is iffy. I've had frost and temps this low hurt them some years and not other years, so there's a 50-50 chance they'll be OK. I've linked the Minimum Temperature Recorded map that shows the lowest temp recorded at the OK Mesonet stations. It looks to me like most of the state went at least as cold as forecast or, like our place, colder than forecast. The weather this year is yo-yoing so wildly. It is hard on all our plants, even the cool-season ones, to have highs in the 80s one day and then have the lows plunge to the 20s. We'll probably be back in the 80s in a day or two. Can our weather get any more bizarre? Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Today's Minimum Air Temperatures (Mesonet)