OK, all of y'all in northeastern OK, check out the linked frost advisory.....and please cover up those tender plants.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: NWS Frost Advisory

Thanks Dawn! I learned my lesson last year. Haven't put any tender plants out yet!

George
Tahlequah, OK

Thanks Dawn, Just sat down to catch my breath after lugging all of my seedlings into the bunk house to spend the night. I hope this is the last time. Our forecast is 36. When I come back home tonight I will put pots over my WOW experimental plants. Everything else I have out should ride out the weather. My peppers are still under lights, and of course I am sprouting some seeds.

George - Hadn't seen you on for awhile. Thought you might be back in Mexico. Guess you are just busy getting that garden ready.

Thanks for the warning, Dawn,
I'll bring my blooming Iochroma back inside tonight. We haven't put any plants in the vegetable garden yet. They're still living it up in the heat of the greenhouse. I have moved a few plants to the front porch though, to pretty it up. Nothing tender there though, so they should be safe. I try not to plant the vegetable garden with anything tender until April 15. I've lost too many plants over the years due to late freezes. :(
Dawna

Hi George,

I always "learn my lesson" in a year with a late freeze, and it sticks....for a while. Then, after 2 or 3 good springs, I forget that lesson and plant too early again. (Hey, it is just so tempting!)

Anyway, I'm glad you aren't having to run out and cover everything up. The last thing we need is a repeat of last year.

Carol,

I hope this is the last time too. My seedlings have been lugged in and out so many times that they are earning Frequent Flyer Miles. (Hey, they've been traveling a lot...from the screened-in porch to the patio and back again, over and over and over.)

Tonight when I went out to cover up the tomato plants with buckets and pots, deer were in the garden, eating tomato plants. They only got 2 plants, but I can't believe they can stick their heads down through the tops of the cages and get the plants. I only put 3' tall cages over the plants, and guess I should have started with the 6' cages.

I chased the deer away 3 times and they kept coming back, so I finally let three dogs chase them away. I bet they stay away this time. (Or, maybe not.)

Dawna, With me, you get not only a gardening pal but also flood, fire and frost warnings! Well, weather is a part of gardening, for better or worse, and we all have suffered enough at its hands. Not to mention that we sometimes have sparkling conversation on many topics....and my all time favorite "silly" thread was the one with armadillos and driveway alarms. Do you remember it? Seems to me that we were rolling on the floor laughing...

Losing plants to late freezes? I guess we've all been there, done that! (And don't want to do it again either.)

I hope we don't get freezing temps tonight, but better safe than sorry.

It is pretty chilly here already. (Of course, I have been spoiled by all the 80-degree-high/60-degree-low days and nights we've had here in March and April, so 50 degrees feels really chilly at this point.

Dawn

Thanks Dawn!

So far, I only put my potted maters out on the balcony to enjoy some sunshine and get hardened off. They came back inside again tonight.

38° predicted here.

I am a very patient woman as far as planting in the ground goes. I'll wait till tax day, and see what the next 10 days forecast is before planting outside. :)

Moni

A few days ago I declared frosts and freezes over for this spring, weren't you listening?

Kidding of course. Last year I was nervous for a couple of weeks because the warm weather made the pecans break bud very early. Just when it looked like we might make it through, that now-famous Easter morning had temps drop to 24-26 here, killing every opening bud on 90% of the trees. The remaining 10% were still dormant so they produced as normal, but the first 10% of the crop always goes to wildlife and insects anyway, so 0 crop for most people north of I-40, with the exception of the city "heat-island" folks.

Nothing in the current 7-day showing cold temps, so I am starting to get confident!

Moni,

It is projected to go to 37 degrees here early this morning, and I think we will make it because it was 39 degrees at 4 a.m., and I am going to go back to bed now that I woke up and checked it. LOL

It is a clear and windless night here, so I am expecting a light patchy frost to form between now and sunrise.

Scott,

Well, the next time you declare frosts and freezes "over", will you send the memo to the great weathermaker in the sky? LOL

My mature native pecans haven't broken dormancy yet, but the younger ones (less than 10 years old) have. Aren't the youth impetuous? Last year, all our trees had broken dormancy, but apparently we didn't stay cold enough long enough because we had a great pecan crop.

Our current 7 to 10 day forecasts do look great also, temperature-wise, so I am beginning to feel kind of confident too. Unfortunately, the ever-present threat of severe storms and hail pops up here again next week.

My bigger threats this week seem to be the deer, rabbits and armadillos. They have been out and about and very active, and are rudely eating plants that I did not plant for them (the deer and rabbits) and digging burrows in spots they will not be allowed to live in (armadillos--right outside the garden gate)!

Dawn

Well, at 6 AM here, it was about 30 F. I say "about" since my porch thermometer reads 36 and Tahlequah City Airport reports 30. Mine is usually a few degrees warmer than reality because it's close to the house. Still, it would not have been a good "tomato night" if they'd been outside!

Carol, I've just been very busy and unable to check in. Sometimes I drop in and scan the posts, often missing things. But hey, I bet a lot of folks are like this at this time of the year. I just wish it was because of planting! Among other things, our son, who is away at veterinary school, got engaged this week and we have had two banquets (each with a different child) to attend. Whew!

We received our seed potatoes in the mail yesterday. We ordered them because they are Green Mountains, the kind of potato which used to cover about half my home town when I was growing up in NJ. This variety isn't all that common now. I remember, as a boy, being permitted to glean the fields after harvest we'd put up 10 bushels of potatoes in an hour or two. Any they were very good. I want to try them since this variety is known to keep producing as long as one leaves it in the ground. Don't know how it'll work out here in our conditions. I suspect the plants will shut down in July even if we leave them, due to bugs and heat. But we want to give'm a try anyway.

Well I have to go. It's time to milk and do chores!

George
Tahlequah, OK

It hit 33 here this morning for a low. Had a heavy frost, but no ice on anything above grass level. Ready for the plant migration now. :-)

randy

It hit 36 here at our house for a morning low and there was some very light, very patchy frost, but not a lot of it.

I already uncovered all the tomato plants and they are fine. I probably could have gotten away with not covering them, but why take the chance?

I'm moving all the flats of seedlings back outside today for what should be the last time.

Dawn

Dawn if you all got that low we may have gotten even lower being further north. I have not ventured outdoors yet to see if anything is damaged. Most things here can take a little frost I suppose. I have not planted any plants yet. I will have to look at the peach tree.

I don't really have much going on in my yard that looks inviting. Spring seems really late this year to me.
These up and down temps are taking a toll on my arthritis and fibromyalgia so until the weather settles down I doubt I will feel up to getting very serious. What garden planting I do this year will just have to be late. I don't feel up to going through what I went through last spring...lol.

I don't know if it is my health isses causing me to crave warmth...like temps in the upper 70's or even the 80's but spring doesn't seem as warm to me as it used to. Is this the effects of global warming or what? I ponder that question often. It seems to me that I used to be comfy and happy being outdoors in March...now it seems I have only a few days I am truly happy outside until it gets warm and stays that way.....lol. Some gardener that makes me huh? lol Of course where we live up here on "Walton's Mountain" or "Walmart Hill" (as I call it...lol) we have wind constantly and it cools it off quite a bit.

Well I hope everyone got by without damage. It is so discouraging.

If you looked at the photo I posted of our photinias on one of the other threads you also saw the place we are going to attempt to make look nicer under those bushes. I have no idea when this project will be finished. It is up to poor DH to move all that rock around and do most of the grunt work. My job is to supervise and do the planting. ha
Those photinias will be there forever as far we are concerned. There is no way to remove them as far as digging due to a maze of buried cables. I am glad we have found a way to manage them...it would be a mess if we had not finally decided to keep them topped off. It works. I didn't know when we did that what would happen...lol.

At least we have sunshine today and that looks really good.
Have a good day.
G.M.

G.M.,

Y'all may have gotten colder than us, but when I checked the mesonet a 4 a.m., y'all were 2 degrees warmer at that time. (Of course, my yard never matches what our mesonet station records and yours may not match what your mesonet station records.)

I thought it was only me who was getting slower and slower in the cold weather (and less likely to go out into it), so maybe it is related to the fact that every year we're a year older than the year before. LOL

I think that, with the exception of those few days where the high hit the upper 80s and the low stayed in the 60s, we are having a cool spring and very cool nights. A lot of the plants are "slower" this year, and it may be a combination of the cooler nights and the relative winter dryness followed by drenching rains.

When I was younger, I could be outside from sunup to sundown in any temperature and be perfectly comfortable and perfectly happy. Now, though, I prefer moderate temperatures--say above 50 and below 95. I don't like going out when it is too cold in the morning or too hot during the heat of the day. And I have noticed as I get older that the ankles, knees, hips and other joints get a bit more achey than they used to.

Since DH just turned 50 and I will turn 50 next year, we've been joking that "60 is the new 30". BUT, I don't think my body is going to feel anywhere near as good at 60 as it did at 30 (or even at 40 or 45). LOL On the other hand, gardening is great exercise and if I wasn't doing it, I probably would have more aches and pains.

I did see your photo of the photinias and think they make a great screening plant. Unfortunately you sometimes see them planted 2' apart and 3' from the exterior wall of a house, and they just aren't going to be manageable there.

I had photinias in a row alongside our driveway in Fort Worth where they did work perfectly to separate our yard from our neighbor's yard. I only had them about 6' apart and had to do a lot of pruning, but there weren't any overhead lines there, so I pruned them up tree form. I liked them OK, but they are massively overused there and that type of monoculture leads to disease issues. The red-tip photinia shrubs have lots of trouble in the D-FW metroplex with a fugal disease called entomosporium leaf spot, which became an issue there in I guess the early to mid 1990s, if my memory is correct.

I moved all my plants outside today and they are sunbathing. I hope I don't have to more them back onto the screened-in porch one more time.

Dawn

George,

Just before I went to bed I checked the temps and we were at about 46 here while Tahl was already in the 30s. It was the lowest temp I saw in the area. Is that normal? I notice Bartlesville is usually really low.

I don't think we are normally the coolest. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Bartlesville almost always gets colder during the cold time of the year. Many times we're slightly warmer than Tulsa. But this weekend we were pretty cool. When I went out to do chores the other day, and walked up to our thermometer, I discovered that it actually read 33 F. But there was ice on all the animals' water dishes and a heavy frost on the ground.

George