I'm so sorry for all yous who have much invested :( I hope you're able to salvage if this comes to pass. I want to say "I can't believe it.", but it's Oklahoma! lol

Bump

Well, I didn't plant the four pack of tomatoes... I just brought them inside instead. :)

I'll see about finally getting them in the ground after Thursday. :)

Meanwhile.... lets just hunker down and keep warm.

Moni

I have ten pepper plants, four eggplants, six potato plants and ten tomatoes outside. I hate that I'll lose my Sungolds if it freezes but, oh well. I've got 31 more tomato plants in the garage and I guess I can go purchase some peppers.

I will say that, if there is another cold spell next week, as predicted, I am worried. Some of my tomatoes are getting AWFULLY close to being root bound and I don't want to have to wait YET ANOTHER week to plant out.

I will say that, if there is another cold spell next week, as predicted, I am worried. Some of my tomatoes are getting AWFULLY close to being root bound and I don't want to have to wait YET ANOTHER week to plant out.

Luckily i dont have any warm season plants out. I knew easter was way too warm and we wer'nt out of danger yet.

Sorry to hear that ReedBaize! This really sucks.

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

Great tip about the trees, Dawn. I usually just wait until you plant then take another week or two. :-)

My pecan trees are leafing out already. The walnuts are always later. I may lose the blooms on the cherry now but oh well.....

Maybe I should start more seeds? It is awful late, though.

Susan

Susan, I started 12 pepper seeds Monday. I know it is too late but I just got these seeds (two kinds from Ghana) and wanted to try to get some fresh seeds this year in case I like them.( I have no idea how old the seeds are)

Larry

Mia, lol. I didn't even mention corn. I put corn in the ground when the leaves on the white oaks are the size of a squirrel's ear. Now, if that isn't old-timey folklore type knowledge, what is?

I have learned a lot from older gardeners who developed their own "rules" about planting long between we had an OK Mesonet to tell us that the soil temps were warm enough.

One of the earliest rules I learned here in OK was that I should wait and plant beans and corn 2 weeks after my friend, Fred, planted his. His early plantings often froze, so he'd be sowing seed the second time when I was sowing it the first time. Lessons come to us in unexpected ways sometimes.

Susan, Are your pecan trees native or are they named cultivars? My natives are smarter about leafing out too early than some of the named cultivars in orchards near me....but we drove by one pecan orchard the other day that usually blooms before our tree does, and even the trees there are still looking pretty much dormant.

If you want to start seeds of anything, I say go for it. Seeds are not that expensive, unless they are rare or brand new on the market and an AAS winner in the current year (grin), so why not plant some? My only real worry about this spring is that whenever the cold weather leaves we'll instantly go from "too cold" to "too hot" overnight, which seems to occur here fairly often, but plants adapt to such changes pretty well.

Larry, I think the peppers you just started will be fine. I grow some varieties of ornamental peppers that reseed themselves around the garden. They sprout whenever...sometimes in April and sometimes not until much later in May. By late June or early July you cannot tell which peppers were started inside and set out when they were 8 or 10 or 12 weeks old versus which plants were volunteers that sprouted in April or May. They all end up looking about the same size and with the same vigor by mid-summer.

Dawn