I have some tomatoes that look much the same way. I am telling myself it is a combination of lamp burn, sun burn, and carpet burn from dragging them around so much in this crazy weather.

Larry

LOL, at Larry's carpet burn....

It is hard to tell from a picture. In one place it looks like sunburn and in another, like powdery mildew. Does it look like a burn, or like it has a powdered coating on it?

It is definitely damage not mildew. It doesn't come off even if rinsed with water. If it was only 1 or 2 plants I would almost have thought it was a bug sucking the "juices" out but it is all 32 plants and 65% of their leaves show some sign of this damage. My peas are some of the most mature seedlings I have and have had more outside exposure than many others so its odd that they would be sunburned and nothing else did, but they are also listed as cold tolerant so why would they have frost damage in 42° but my other plants are all great (some of my seedlings only have a single set of true leaves & probably have no business being outside but I didn't have a choice). I guess we shall see what happens! Thanks so much for all your inputs! And good luck in this fickle Oklahoma weather: its never a dull moment ;)

It is definitely damage not mildew. It doesn't come off even if rinsed with water. If it was only 1 or 2 plants I would almost have thought it was a bug sucking the "juices" out but it is all 32 plants and 65% of their leaves show some sign of this damage. My peas are some of the most mature seedlings I have and have had more outside exposure than many others so its odd that they would be sunburned and nothing else did, but they are also listed as cold tolerant so why would they have frost damage in 42° but my other plants are all great (some of my seedlings only have a single set of true leaves & probably have no business being outside but I didn't have a choice). I guess we shall see what happens! Thanks so much for all your inputs! And good luck in this fickle Oklahoma weather: its never a dull moment ;)

{{gwi:1095834}}

To me it looks like sunburn or windburn. Your peas look a bit spindly and tender, like my first batch did when I put them in the ground in late March. Some of mine sunburned a bit, but not that badly. Then we got that 22 degree night right after I put them in the ground and some of them showed frost damage. They have all recovered and are growing now but still don't look as good as the ones I planted later. Hopefully yours will also recover.

It looks like environmental stress and most environmental stress looks pretty much the same so we can't just look at a photo and say with total certainty that it is from too much heat or too much cold or too much wind or too much sunlight without being properly hardened off. Having said that, it looks more like sunburn than anything else but also could include wind burn. They can look just about the same.

However, there are some viruses and diseases peas get that might look similar. Based on the fact that you just moved the peas to the greenhouse, it is more likely to be environmental stress than a disease at this point. I did wonder about powdery mildew, but you and Carol already discussed that.

Now, a couple of pea pointers:

It is too late to be planting peas now with an expectation of getting much of a harvest. The OSU-recommended planting dates for peas are Feb 15 - Mar 10. I won't say I always have my peas in the ground by March 10th, but I sure do try to get them into the ground as close to the recommended dates as possible. This year I did staggered plantings, and think I put 2 varieties in the ground, then waited a week and put two more varieties in the ground, and then waited another week and put two more in the ground. That way, if we suddenly turned very cold, I wasn't risking all of them in the first planting.

Sometimes we have to hold our plants indoors or inside the greenhouse or on a porch or patio while we wait for overnight lows to stabilize at or above the mid-20s. Pea plants can suffer from freeze damage when the temperatures are in the low-20s no matter how well hardened-off they are. Every plant has a specific temperature it will endure, and for snap peas, the low 20s are about as low as they can handle. If you keep them indoors all the time, they don't have a chance to get used to any cool temperatures so the next time you grow them, you might try exposing them to colder temperatures earlier in their lives so they can develop the tolerance they need.

Pea plants generally tolerate light frosts but often abort their blossoms if the temperatures drop below freezing while they are in bloom. However, I have 6 varieties of pea plants all in bloom and producing peas and we went down to 28 degrees this morning and none of them showed any sign of dropping blossoms today, and the peas on the plants weren't harmed either. I was snacking on peas right off the vine while weeding this afternoon.

My favorite way to raise tough plants that can handle whatever the OK weather throws at them is to plant them in soil-less mix in paper cups and put them on the light shelf indoors, or on top of the freezer. The minute I see a tiny green sprout from the first pea poking up out of the soil-less mix, I move them outdoors to grow in the actual temperatures, wind and sunlight they'll encounter in the real world. This gives me strong, resilient plants that tolerate a lot of variance in the weather conditions. If you raise your plants in the relatively cushy conditions indoors, they can find it very hard to adjust to the wide range of temperatures and wind speeds we have here in late winter and early spring, and they won't be real fond of the sunlight either. Hardening them off at the rate of increasing their exposure 1 hour per day is a lot harder if they've been kept inside very long. So, by having them outside from day one, I pretty much avoid having to do the hardening off routine. If a prolonged very cold spell hits and I have to move them indoors and keep them indoors for several days, then when I move them back outside they have lost their ability to cope with outdoor temperatures and you do have to start at square one again with the hardening-off process. As Larry noted, this has been a year when we've had a lot of that going on.

My peas are outside in full sun and wind all day and inside the greenhouse at night to protect them from frosts and to keep the rabbits and deer from eating them. Thus, when it is time to put them in the ground, they are ready to go at any time. That allows me to put them in the ground earlier in a year when we have our last freeze really early like we did in 2012. I know my plants were exposed to temperatures in the 20s multiple times in the unheated greenhouse at night this year but they never really showed any damage. They had one cold night of 23 degrees after I transplanted them into the ground and they seemed to stall and not grow for a couple of days, but then they bounced back. Next year, try moving your pea plants outside to the porch or greenhouse and give them exposure to the sunlight and various temperatures from the start and you'll have tougher and more resilient plants.

With a greenhouse, you can roast your plants during the day even in winter, so if you don't have a Min-Max Thermometer in there, I'd suggest you put one in there. You may be surprised at how hot a greenhouse can be. The first winter I used our greenhouse, and before we had shadecloth on it, the temperature in it went up to 145 degrees in full sun with both doors and all 4 vents open. We put Aluminet 50% shadecloth on it, and since then, it usually doesn't get any hotter than 115 degrees, and that is only if I opened the doors but forgot to open the vents. Most days, if the sun is shining but with both doors open and vents open if needed, the greenhouse only gets 8-15 degrees warmer than the outside air. On cold days I can keep it a lot hotter than the outside air by keeping the doors and vents closed. Watch your greenhouse and learn how much hotter it gets both day and night so that you can move plants in or out of it as needed. Today's a nice example because we had a wide temperature range and the greenhouse handled it pretty well. Our low temp this morning outdoors was 28 degrees but the greenhouse only went down to 38 degrees. Our high temp this afternoon outdoors was 75 degrees but the greenhouse went up to 89 degrees. That was with both doors open but the 4 vents were closed. (All the plants were outside on the driveway in full sun all day, so I didn't bother opening the vents.

You never know how long snap peas will produce here because the heat shuts them down, and we never really know when the heat will arrive. Where I live in south-central OK, the heat shuts them down in May or June, and more commonly in May than in June. One year I was able to harvest them until mid-June. I think that was in 2010 and we harvested over 30 lbs. of snap peas that year. It was amazing. More typically they are starting to suffer from the heat and powdery mildew shortly before Memorial Day, and I don't really get too upset over it. I just yank them out and replace them with a warm-season crop.

My best guess about why your pea plants showed damage and the others didn't is that the damage is a combination of sunburn, windburn and hot temperatures in the greenhouse more than it is a result of cold temperatures at night. However, if the peas never have been exposed to temperatures in the 40s, they might not have like that experience very much and their growth might stall.

Next year start your seeds early and try to get the plants into the ground as close to the recommended dates as you can and you'll be off to a great start. Planting cool-season crops a week or two late isn't much of a problem. Planting them a month or two late can just ruin your chance of getting much of anything from them.

Dawn

Peas, especially Sugar Snaps, need to germinate in warmer temps than they will grow in, so like Dawn, I start them inside. I soak them overnight, then rinse and cover with wet paper towels until I see sprouts. Then I plant sprouted seeds in individual peat pots or paper cups in soilless mix. I then raise them for only two weeks in those cups in the greenhouse, taking the trays outside on days that are warm enough. Most years I start the first seed around midFebruary and put the first ones in the ground in early March and then start the last ones two weeks later. This year the whole process was delayed, due to the weather.

One year I thought I would skip the potting-into-cups step and plant sprouted seeds directly into the ground, but that was almost as much a failure as planting dry seed into the ground. Too many rotted. So I went back to potting up individually. When it is time to plant I either plant the whole peat pot as directed or I carefully tear off the bottom half of the paper cup and leave the rest to protect the seed underground and the stem from cut worms. Some people plant double rows one on each side of the trellis, but I plant a single, placing the cups or pots touching each other. And I always expect to put up peas on Memorial Day and pull the plants. And if in a cool year they hang on til midJune, it's a bonus.

Thanks for all the helpful information! I'm updating my pea page in my garden journal right now.. I didn't realize the ground was warm enough in feb-march to plant but I also didn't know a single thing about gardening a month ago! Lol I bought a couple books and started gorging on any information I can lay my eyes on! Next year is going to be so much better! I wish I started reading/learning all this last October! (Or a decade ago, considering how wonderful it all is!) Ha Thanks again, starting seedling outside early seems so much easier/smarter than the hardening off process after weeks indoors. I didn't know I could do that. But that's why I'm calling this my trial and error garden!

Dorothy, My experience with planting in the ground is exactly the same as yours. Not only did they begin to rot without sprouting, but something was eating the peas underground because they would entirely disappear overnight without a trace.

You and I do sprout our peas in similar ways and plant out at about the same time even though I am a lot further south and it would seem like I could plant earlier than you, but I can't....and I blame it on my cold microclimate. If I planted much earlier than you, I don't think I'd get a crop any earlier.

Amunk1, One thing I love about gardening is that everything we do can be viewed as an experiment. Try something one way, learn from that and then the next time you can try it a different way in order to improve upon the previous effort. My entire garden is just one big experiment every year with many smaller experiments going on within the big experiment.

Dorothy and I both have been gardening a long time(and I won't rat out her age or mine by admitting exactly how long) and I guarantee you I do not do things the exact same way now that I did them in the 1980s or 1990s or early 2000s, and certainly not the way I did things in the 1970s when I was very young and tended to love my plants to death by overwatering them. It is important to not get stuck in a rut and keep on doing things the same way you did them in the past. There's always room for improvement and it is fun to try to improve your garden's appearance and productivity every year. Realistically speaking, here in OK, sometimes we are happy if we just manage to keep our gardens alive.

Peas grow best and taste best when they mature before temperatures begin regularly exceeding 75 degrees. That statement sounds so calm and logical, but Oklahoma weather is not calm and logical. It is a wild roller coaster ride, and I find it rare for us to stay cool enough long enough for my snap peas to grow well enough that they are producing much of a crop while the daytime highs are still in the 70s. In that sense, this is looking like a really good pea year. The issue, though, is that just because we have highs at our house in the 70s this week, that doesn't mean they'll last long. We could be in the 80s next week and the 90s the week after that. That is why is it so important to plant early.

Technically, the ground usually is a bit too cold for peas to sprout during the OSU-recommended planting time. They will sprout if conditions are perfect, but if we are too wet or too cold, they can rot before they sprout. That's why a lot of us sprout our peas indoors by soaking them in water for a few hours, wrapping them in a paper towel or coffee filter and popping them into soil-less mix as soon as the peas have small sprouts. I have done that every year I've grown them here except the first year, when I planted them in the ground and they sprouted and grew...and then it got hot and they died before making very many peas. The odd thing is that while they won't sprout easily in cold soil, they grow well in it. So, we start early and baby them through a few bitter cold nights (by covering them up) because it is the best way to "guarantee" a crop, though you really aren't guaranteeing a crop so much as improving your chance of getting one. In areas of the country that have a slower transition from winter's cold to summer's heat, gardeners can just wait for the soil to warm up some more and then plant the pea seeds directly in the ground. In OK, where we can literally go from too cold to too hot in one week some years, we don't have that luxury.

I deviated from sprouting the pea seeds in paper towels this year because I wanted to see if they would sprout in soil-less mix as easily as in paper towels. They did, but were a little slower. I started early, so that wasn't a big issue. Had I been running behind on seed-starting, I would have sprouted them first in paper towels to speed up the process.

I learned to grow almost everything in the ground from seed first (except tomatoes, peppers and eggplant which need to be started indoors far in advance of the transplant date) and then learned how to start seed indoors for transplants. I think that helped because I already knew when everything should be put into the ground, so all I had to work on was learning how early to start them indoors so they were the right size at transplant time and learning how to harden off plants grown indoors, which I learned in Texas in the 1990s. I had to change things a bit when I moved farther north to OK because our nights stay a lot colder a lot longer.

With greenhouses, there is a learning curve. The smaller the greenhouse,l the harder it is to regulate the temperature and the light. I feel like the shadecloth made growing in the greenhouse so much easier. It also helps to have a fan to give your plants good air movement for good plant health while in the greenhouse, and I think that Dorothy has a heated propagation bench, but I don't.

I'm going to assume you've seen the OSU Garden Planning Guide that has planting dates for cool season crops in winter/spring and warm season planting dates in spring/mid-summer. So, instead of linking it again since we link it often in various 'new gardener' threads, I am going to link the Fall Garden Planning Guide. You can look ahead to what you can plant in summer (and a few things in fall) for a fall harvest.

I usually start my seeds for my fall tomato plants in May so I can put the fall tomatoes in the ground in mid-June through early July. It seems silly to a non-gardener when they look at the beautiful tomato plants in my garden in June and then look at the tiny seedlings I'm growing for fall. Not being gardeners, they don't understand why a person starts new plants for fall. If they were gardeners they'd understand that July and August are really tough on tomato plants here and that fresh, new plants that just went into the ground in early summer have more vigor and do better in fall than older plants that are running out of energy. For a long time....and I mean a couple of decades or further back, I carried over the spring plants through the fall but once I tried with fresh plants for fall, I was amazed at how much better they do. Now, see, that is the sort of experiment that pays off. I never would have known how well it would work if I hadn't tried it.

One of the wonderful thing about gardening in Oklahoma is we have a very long growing season, although technically it is broken up into smaller sub-seasons. That means that we get a second chance in fall with many cool-season and warm-season plants. Keep in mind, we often have to plant in ridiculously hot and miserably dry weather in June through August so we can be harvesting in September through December or later. The fall season really is a fall harvesting season because the fall garden planting mostly occurs in summer. Technically, the fall garden planting season starts with tomatoes going into the ground July 1st. That means you need to start your seeds 6-8 weeks before that so you'll have transplants ready by July 1st, and I often put them into the ground a week or two earlier than that, usually to fill a space made empty by the removal of a cool-season crop that is finished producing.

I personally haven't had much luck with snap peas in fall. Often, just about the time the heat drops enough that the plants grow well,, we turn significantly colder and we get too cold too early and the blossoms drop off the plants. I keep trying though, because maybe one of these years I'll get it right. Some crops, though, like kale, cauliflower and brussels sprouts do better in the fall than in the spring.

Just keep planting and plugging away. Even when you encounter obstacles, every experience is a learning experience. Every learning experience makes you a better gardener. Nobody is successful with every crop every year. I'm happy if 75% if the crops I plant produce an edible harvest. We just have too much odd weather and too many pests to reasonably expect 100% success every year.

Remember, too, to enjoy the process. Don't worry, don't hurry....and don't forget to stop and smell the flowers. To me, the process of gardening is more important than the end result. I try to enjoy every day of the journey, and then whatever crop is there at the end of the journey is just a bonus.

Gardening is very rewarding and can add great joy to your life, but some years it brings a lot of stress and I think we all find ourselves too garden-stressed at times. If we had perfect weather and no pests, what would we talk about? We'd just sit here saying "the broccoli is going bonkers, the potatoes are perfect, the lettuce is lovely and the tomatoes are terrific" and it would be so boring. Generally, gardening in OK includes a certain amount of, hmm, let's call it "drama", and it often arrives in the form of late freezes, late snow, sleet, hail, tornadoes, derecho winds, microbursts, an occasional haboob, wind-driven wildfire, graupel, thundersnow, flooding rain or, conversely, months with almost no rain at all and tremendous drought. Sometimes I think to myself "if the weather was perfect, what would we discuss here?" Not to worry, though, because it never will happen. Our weather is many things, but "perfect" is not one of them, but we just keep on keeping on anyhow.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Fall Garden Planning Guide

derecho? haboob? graupel? (That one is an Italian wine, which we all need sometimes. Wait, that's graupa.) Now where did I put that weather dictionary?

lol lol lol

Haboobs are big dust storms. We get them here out of west Texas or western north Texas maybe once every 3 or 4 years. They usually are accompanied by very strong winds of the type that snap a power pole here or there or bring down power lines and trees, sometimes starting fires.The sky turns the color of the Texas soil you see out around Abilene or Lubbock, and if it rains at the same time, you have big dustly splotches all over your vehicles. Arizona has them a lot more often than we do and theirs are a lot bigger. We just call them dust storms here, but I threw the haboob name into the mix to stir up some interest in all the odd weather here. (grin) You know, we have so many interesting weather events here that we should keep lists of all the things that happen the same way that serious birders keep a life list of every bird species they see.

Graupel is that little pelleted snow-like stuff that looks like the white styrofoam pellets they used to put in bean bag chairs (I don't know if bean bag chairs still have those inside). We had some here this winter and we've had it before but I didn't know its actual name until this year.

Derecho winds are those strong straight-line winds that blow through suddenly. If you are watching the radar and weather maps you can see them move across the countryside like a big wave of air. We had one here in the early 2000s that hit in the middle of the night, and it hit so hard we thought a vehicle of some had hit our house while we were sleeping and knocked us out of bed. lol We ran downstairs and opened the doors and looked outside and the wind was howling and the temperatures were plunging, so we carried in about 12 or 15 flats of plants from the screen porch. By sunrise we were 30 degrees colder than we had been at bedtime the night before. Derecho winds often bring down tons of trees and sometimes they blow over/roll over mobile homes, sheds that are not attached to a cement foundation, etc. We had another one in 2004. I remember it well because our friend Ken was up on the roof of our garage which was then under construction and I had to run out there and tell him that Tom Miller on Channel 12 said everyone working outdoors, especially around trees and power lines, needed to be indoors in a safe place before the derecho winds hit our area around 3 p.m. That particular derecho was accompanied by a significant number of lightning strikes, which I think is pretty typical. We had a whole lot of lightning. It was like a strobe light. At that point Ken and his sons were welding the steel beams together and didn't want to stop, but they did. They arrived home about the same time the derecho did.I was glad I was able to get them down off the roof before the weather rolled through.

With that one, since the TV met told us what time to expect it, I ran outside and went down the driveway to the road and looked north and was watching the big dark cloud approaching. (Up by the house, the trees in the forest block the view of the sky to our north.) You could hear the wind howling as it came roaring towards you, with the wind arriving several minutes after you first started hearing it. It was scary, and I ran back inside before it actually arrived here. Had I not watched the news and known a derecho was coming, I likely would have thought a tornado was approaching just because of that roaring wind.

I never had heard of these (or of thundersnow or thundersleet) until we moved here, and never expected to experience a blizzard, but we had one here a few years back.

Oklahoma gets my vote for the biggest collection of the various types of weather events in the world, though California likely would feel they have more since they get the Santa Ana winds. I've also seen more tornadoes in the air (and thankfully not on the ground) in the 15 years we've been here than I saw in 39 years in Texas.

I barely paid any attention to the weather before we moved here, and I was a lifelong gardener so it wasn't like I wasn't aware of weather. It is just that the weather I was used to was more....um, calm and sedate than the weather here. We'd have an occasional severe thunderstorm and sometimes big hail, but not all that often. All I cared about was the forecast high, low and precipitation. I ignored everything else.

Nor did I mention Erin, which likely was the closest OK will get to experiencing a tropical cyclone, though she was just a remnant low when she swirled her way over our heads and dumped tons of rain here.

I didn't even mention the earthquakes either, but they aren't really weather, and they won't hurt our gardens like the weather does, unless we're on a fault line and our ground cracks open. I've been at home and felt two earthquakes in the last couple of years. Tim and Chris were at work both times and missed those, but then they had two in Irving near the airport while they were there a year or so later.

Graupa sounds yummy. There are days in the garden when my mood likely would improve with a glass of wine.

I am watching our local news right now and our local TV met has that big cold front bringing us temperatures in the 30s late next week---exactly what Lee warned us might be headed our way. I suppose I will hang on to the pepper plants a bit longer, so guess I will pot them up into bigger pots tomorrow. Grrrrr.

Dawn

Haboob I knew; Derecho I knew....Graupel I did not know - wait 'til I get to use THAT one in conversation :)
Thanks, Dawn!

Sharon