That's interesting, I think we are going to warm up fast like last year. I am just hoping we don't get the same heat!

Melissia,

It is crazy, isn't it? I already have canna foliage up and growing which just seems insane. The daffodils have bloomed and continue to bloom, and yesterday I saw the earliest flowers blooming on some Bradford pears in Ardmore. In our pasture the cool-season wildflowers have been a month ahead of themselves. We had henbit blooming in December, and chickweed, speedwell, wild garlic (usually blooms here in March), bluets and spring beauties blooming in January. One early bird yarrow plant also is in bloom in the pasture alongside the greenhouse. The 'Pink Lemonade' honeysuckle started blooming either last week or the week before. The brugmansias are putting out new foliage, and the fig trees are trying to leaf out.

My plum trees, which seem to bloom early every year, have flower buds that are about to open. I think they will start blooming today or tomorrow, and since more cold weather seems inevitable, we'll likely lose the crop to a late freeze.

We also have wildflowers in bloom that I haven't seen here before. I suspect the heavy rainfall that has fallen fairly regularly since September here, plus the warmer-than-average winter temps, are going to give us a great wildflower year, or at least a great wildflower spring. It is too soon to know if the rain will continue falling and we'll have a great wildflower summer, but I like the odds.

Dwn

I saw some roses blooming today. Even with the early warm-up, it sure seems early for roses.

Early here too. The early daffs have been blooming for a month and now the midseason ones are opening. I saw Spring Beauties today and the first of the windflowers (anemones) too. And like Dawn we've had henbit off and on since Dec.

My santa rosa plum is also showing white on the flower buds although i'm probably a week or two behind Dawn. Do any of you have any thoughts on how to save some of the bloom? i have one method to partially save some of the bloom but it only works if the weather is not wet. I use clampon lights with 150w heat lamp bulbs and clamp them on a limb and place them just far enough away from the flowers so as not to burn them. Even if we have a heavy frost I generally will get fruit 24 to 30 in. wide by 4 or 5 ft. high from the bulb. With 3 lights I can get 70 or 80 percent of the crop. I got this idea from a man who lives over by Lake Hefner whos back yard was lit up like a Christmas tree on frosty nights. If anyone has any other ideas I'd like to hear them.

Telow, You might be able to save fruit by putting Agribon row cover over the tree as much as possible if frost threatens. I use Agribon with veggies, herbs and flowers, but haven't tried to put it over a tree, mostly because I am not sure how I'd keep it there. I might try it this year if frost threatens (and it will) after fruit has set.

Some people run a sprinkler on freezing nights to protect the fruit, but there is no guarantee it will work. I remember back in the old days when some people would burn bales of hay in their orchards to try to create enough heat (I guess) to protect their crops, but I don't know how they did it or how well it worked.

I almost had a plum crop last year. The flowers set fruit and frost didn't hit them hard enough to knock the fruit off the trees, but then 11 separate hail storms each took out part of the fruit each time until it was almost all gone. When all was said and done, one lonely plum survived. It was just sad.

I've used lights and I've used tarps over trees, and I've used them together, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't.

Dawn

I think it's amazing. I needed hay in the middle of summer and now my pasture is green with plenty to spare ... It's just wild. The horses aren't complaining though.

I'm a little bit leery of the nice weather. Not that I don't enjoy it--I do, but I just hope it doesn't get crazy hot again this year. I'm hoping for a mild, wet summer.

Kelly

Thanks Dawn. You just gave me a great idea.......I think. I'm off to do research. If I find what i'm looking for I'll tell you what I'm thinking, and if not, I will go quietly into the ethernet.

Melissia,

It is wonderful to see the green in the pastures, and everywhere else too. I've noticed that the cows and horses that live around us aren't having to spend the whole day walking around the pastures eating---they are able to eat what they want and they stand around or lie around in the sun (and the shade!) and take it easy.

Yesterday I saw the first tiny newborn calf of spring struggling to stand beside its mother on wobbly little legs, which really made it feel like spring!

Kelly, Our high temps here in southern OK are running so high for this time of the year that it scares me. It hit 78.3 here yesterday afternoon, and that was on a thermometer on the east-facing porch, so the thermometer was in full shade. I like temps that are 10-15 degrees above average in January, February or March, but sure don't want them to be that far above average in June, July and August.

Telow, You're welcome. I look forward to hearing about your ideas. Do NOT go quietly into the ethernet. We all enjoy experimenting with new ideas to provide plant protection from the weather, and we like hearing about other gardeners' experiments, even when they don't work out as planned or hoped. To me, gardening is just a big, scientific experiment with constant tinkering to figure out what works best in any given year and in any given conditions. Sometimes the things we try do not work out the way we had thought they would or had hoped they would, but it still is a good learning experience.

Dawn

Okay, heres my idea. Basically, gardeners have been doing things similar for years. At globalindustrial.com you can buy a 30x30ft. wovan and laminated tarp (blue) for 38.95 + shipping at 19.44 bringing the total to 58.39. The tarp has eyelets every three ft. I personally don't plant anything but dwarf fruit trees (6 to 10ft. max) and this idea is based on that. I will still use heat lamps for the heat source.Next, lay out the tarp. Tape a nail or something like that to the end of a polesaw and put it thru an eyelet and lift the tarp up over the tree. One person could probably do it but two would be better. I have several ideas on how to secure the tarp to the ground, one being the use of tent stakes which might be to large for the eyelets.You could also use heavy rocks or other objects to hold it down from the wind.Wooden stakes driven into the ground and tied to the eyelets would work too. Anyway, the basic idea is to build a tent over the tree with some heat underneath. As the Eagles Don Henley sang....how bad do you want it.

I forgot to mention that I've had one of these tarps over my lawnmower for 20 yrs. and its still like new. Since these tarps will only be used a couple days a year, they should last a lifetime.

It isn't a bad idea. I have covered them with 6 mm clear plastic before. Wherever the plastic touched the foliage or flowers during a frost or freeze, the part that touched the plastic was damaged but the rest of the tree was fine.

My trees aren't dwarf or semi-dwarf though, so it is hard to completely cover them up.

The plum tree is blooming now and we'll be in the mid-30s tonight and low 30s tomorrow. It happens almost every year, so I should be used to it by now.

I'm just nosy Dawn......this is off the subject of this thread but what variety of plum do you have and how tall does it get?

Dh and I took a drive into Ark to hike today and going east on I40 out of Van Buren we saw several dozen trees with small white flowers. Think they may have been wild plum. Also saw some maple blooming. Then up the hill saw several dogtooth violets in bloom, as well as cutleaf toothwort and spring beauties.

Telow,

We have a Santa Rosa, an Ozark Premier and several native Mexican plums.

I try to keep the Santa Rosa and Ozark Premier pruned to about 12' in height. They are pruned in a nice bowl shape so they are about as wide as they are tall. The native Mexican plum I have planted beside them is more upright because I don't prune it. While the native plums are small, they make wonderful plum jelly. However, in a good year, the other two plum trees make so much fruit that I just leave the native plums for the wild birds and other wildlife.

Because plums tend to bloom early in warm winters and then get hit hard by freezing weather, I only get a good crop about once every three years. The last good fruit year was 2010(and it was the best plum and peach year ever here in Oklahoma), I harvested about 130 lbs. from the Santa Rosa, 139 lbs. from the Ozark Premier and 85 lbs. from the peach tree, which I think is a RedHaven. The next time I plant fruit trees, I'll write down their names because my memory is worse and worse every year. For a long time I thought I'd planted Methley, but when it fruited, the fruit was not Methley and I finally figured out it was Ozark Premier. Obviously a family cannot eat approximately 350 lbs. of fresh fruit quickly enough before it goes bad, so I preserved a lot of the plums and peaches and gave some of them away.

That summer I froze about 20 quarts of peaches (we're enjoying the next to the last quart this week), dried some plums and turned them into prunes, and made every kind of peach and plum preserves, jams, jellies and spiced butters you can think of....around 175 jars plus another dozen jars of freezer jam. We gave away a lot of that as gifts, but still have some of it in the pantry. Even better, I extracted and froze about 15 or 20 batches of plum juice and it still is in the freezer. Each batch of frozen plum juice, when thawed, will make one batch (about 6-7 pint jars) of plum jelly. Thus, even if this year's plum crop freezes, I'll still be able to make oodles of plum jelly just as if we'd had a great crop. I have the pectin, sugar and jars and will start making plum jelly soon so I can refill the canning shelves with jars of jelly, and empty out a portion of the freezer.

It is a bummer when we get a small crop or no crop because of freezing weather or hail, but in a good year, we preserve enough to last us a good long time. Also, in a good year when the harvest is plentiful, we eat them until we are almost sick of them.

Someone looked at my plum trees in 2010 right before I began to harvest and commented that I "should have" thinned the fruit. I told him I had removed about 96% of the fruit when I thinned and we still had that many hundreds of fruit left. To me, the hardest thing in the world is the thinning, but if you don't do it, you get plums the size of grapes. I thinned and thinned for days and removed thousands of tiny plums from the trees. His trees produced well also that year, but not nearly as well as ours, and I think maybe he had fewer bees around pollinating when the trees were blooming. We always have a gazillion bees here, likely because we don't use broad-spectrum pesticides.

Dawn

While reading your post,Dawn, I realized I was doing some prodigeous salivating. I have to remind myself everytime i'm looking at a raintree or starks catalog that I don't need another plum tree and to get a grip on myself and put the catalogs away.lol

I wish I had planted another half-dozen fruit trees of various types. It would be easy to get carried away and plant too many, which wouldn't matter in a bad year, but in a good year we'd be overwhelmed with fruit.

As fondly as I look back at the summer of 2010, it was very difficult at the time. I literally harvested fruits and veggies, processed fruit and veggies and canned from 6 a.m. to between 10 p.m. and midnight for several weeks. After enough time passes though, you forget the pain and exhaustion and just remember the piles of fruit and jars and freezer bags of preserved fruit.

The peach tree has borers and needs to go. The plum trees, which are right beside it and were planted the same year, are fine. When we take out the peach tree, I am going to replace it with three trees with staggered fruit maturity times so that the harvest is more spread out.

I cannot even look at the catalogs or websites of Raintree or Starks or I start making plans to clear an acre of the native woodland and replace all those trees with fruit trees. I wouldn't mind replacing some of the native woodland with an orchard of fruit and nut trees, but am afraid I'd plant so many that the harvest would kill me. We have a lot of native Mexican plums at the back of the property but because of previous issues with feral hogs and cougars, I almost never go back that far (roughly 300 yards) from the house any more, and I never go back there alone.

I just noticed today that my crabapple tree is leafing out. I know it's always the first of my trees/shrubs to show signs of life, but I thought that in past years the Bradford Pears were at least in bloom first. It's ahead of the forsythias, too (which I also noticed today are being "pruned" by the rabbits...grr). I'm not sure how frost/freeze tolerant it is, so I'd rather not find out. At least it's still short enough that I can toss a sheet over it if I need to.

Everything is trying to leaf out here, and I can't help thinking the plants are going to be sorry! Our mesonet station was showing 24 degrees when I got up about an hour ago. I would think the blooms on my plum tree may be in trouble if it got that cold here.

I always watch the native redbuds and native pecans. Neither of them is prone to getting too excited and blooming too soon. I think maybe 1 year out of 10 the pecans will bloom too early and be hit hard by a late freeze. So far, our redbud and pecan trees are not budding. Apparently they "know" it still is too cold.