Well, we have a long night to get through, but if can make it through all night and to sunrise tomorrow, then maybe the plants/fruits/nuts will survive. Wind here is breaking tree limbs and snapping corn plants occasionally, but that's life on the southern plains. It isn't anything major. Just little wind damage.

I never feel safe from frost until after the first week of May, but I really cannot imagine that will happen this year--not as warm as it has been.

Have watched weather on and off all day. Poor Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa as well as NW OK. What a rough day so far.

I hope everyone and their plants wake up happy tomorrow...and healthy and whole.

Dawn

I left hail helmets on tomatoes and peppers since yesterday, will take off tomorrow. Am waiting for latest round to go through before trying to thin peaches and plums (peaches are blushing already, is that ok?) Also found we have a pecan (caterpillar type fuzzy things clued me in) and possibly a black walnut. wheee!

Scott I hope the freezes, hail and wind misses you and you have a great crop this year. Depending on which source you look at we may have 1-3 nights in the upper 30's starting tonight. But when it is upper 30's things can be a little lower on the lower end of my main garden. After Tuesday night it is mainly lows in the 50's except for 1-2 nights of upper 40s for the next 2 weeks although that can change fast. Although our average last frost date is April 16th we have had freezes in May the last 3 years. It is still 64 here now. I've seen predicted lows for tonight from 39-52. I went ahead and put trash sacks with slits in the tops over 2 WOW's. The plants in them are starting to push out the top and have blooms. I also started the heater in the lean to but don't think I needed to do either. I covered the cold frame with plants in it also. I didn't cover the potatoes. I may pull row cover over them tomorrow night. It will depend on if the predictions change any. I hope this is the year we don't have a late freeze. If things will continue like they have for another 3 weeks this will be the best start to a season I've had in sometime. But the plants in the WOW's are really jumping and in another 2 weeks the tops of some will be hard to protect. Jay

Mia, How big are the peaches that are blushing? They should be small and young and not truly blushing like green peaches do as they size up/color up when reaching maturity. I suspect you might have a peach variety that's naturally reddish in nature like Red Haven, for example, which will have a blush of red very early in the fruit's development.

I have my trees about half-thinned, and the rowdy winds on Fri-Sat did some more thinning for me, but I will finish thinning in the next couple of days. I have to stand on a metal ladder to thin, so am waiting for clear skies and no thunderstorms anywhere around.

The discovery of the pecan tree is a great one. We have native pecans that produce good crops some years, and though the pecans are small, they sure do taste good.

I am not sure if your Black Walnut "whee" is a good "whee" or a bad "whee". Are you aware of the juglone toxicity that accompanies black walnuts? See the link below. The toxicity is discussed on about page 4 or 5 of the linked document. We cut down the black walnuts within 100' of our home, garden and yard and I never collect leaves from any place near them when I am collecting leaves for mulching or for the compost pile. Black walnuts are great as long as you aren't trying to grow the plants that cannot tolerate juglone.

Jay, Our forecast here bottoms out at 48 so I think we'll be OK. Still, I will watch carefully tonight and tomorrow night in case the weather decides to misbehave and go much lower than forecast.

I covered up everything I could last night and will leave the buckets over the tomato plants a few more hours since the weather is still active close to us. I couldn't cover up the taller tomato plants that were too tall for buckets, but I managed to cover up the 70 smallest ones. We also covered snap peas, potatoes and onions with bird netting suspended over hoops. When the squall line hit us in the early morning hours, I heard rain and then heard about 20 seconds worth of what sounded like hail. I went outside and couldn't find hail in the dark, so maybe it was not significant hail or only a few stray hailstones, but plums the size of walnuts were knocked off of one tree. The tree beside it didn't lose a single fruit and neither did the peach tree about 30' away.

I hope your great start continues and that frost or freezing weather doesn't interfere with it.

Like you, I am off to the best early start with the spring garden that I've been able to manage since about 2005 or 2006 and am so delighted with how well the garden is growing. This cool spell may slow down growth of warm-season plants for a few days, but the cool-season crops will appreciate the cooler temps.

Some potatoes already are blooming as are peas. Most of my in-ground tomato plants from the earliest plantings done in mid-March have set fruit, while others that went into the ground near the end of March are just starting to bloom. The garden looks better overall than I dare hope for it to look at this time of year. Now, if only the weather will let our gardens thrive.

That was the upside. The downside is that every weed in southern Oklahoma has sprouted and they are growing at an insane rate. I spend part of every single day weeding and mulching, weeding and mulching. Most of the veggie garden is under control, but the flowers beds aren't in quite as good shape yet.

Dawn

Forgot to link the document in previous post.

Here is a link that might be useful: Black Walnut Toxicity Discussed on Page 5

Dawn the link to the Black Walnut toxicity is a good one and it is always good to be reminded. I have one Black Walnut tree. It is the only one of the original trees around here that survived my attempt at applying a chemical to clear my fence rows of weeds and bindweed when I purchased this property. It had never had been totally neglected for over 2 years. And that was during a time period we were receiving rainfall here. The good chemical man at the co-op told me it would do what I wanted but not to apply withing 20 ft of any trees. These were established trees and I found out their roots went at least 50-60 foot to the side. I killed several and one side of the black walnut. I decided to leave it as it survived and also because the squirrels love the nuts in the fall and it never fails to produce at least a few. Even last year it produced a few small ones. I don't let any of the volunteers live though. This leads to my story. I have had a bed on the south side of my garage that is 50-60 ft from the tree and had never had any issue growing anything in that bed. Also the water from the south side of the roof drains on it but being it is fast draining sand I have never had an issue. Starting in the second year of the drought I started losing some plants. Then the following year I either lost or severely stunted more tomato plants. Last year I had similar results with potatoes. I dug down and found the Black Walnut roots have ventured into this bed. They are between a foot and 2 ft down. So why the plants would start off great and then go downhill. I imagine due to the severe drought the roots were seeking moisture and they found it. Now I will have to grow something in that bed that isn't affected by the toxicity. Haven't decided for sure yet what it might be. I have an asparagus bed right next to it and it does great. I might try moving my horseradish over to it and then using that bed for other crops. I assume beans would grow ok there also. This is a long way of saying just because you haven't had an issue before or because you are several ft from a black walnut tree it can and will cause issues.

Dawn our low was 45 after a predicted low of 38 by the NWS. Although the other two I check at both said 41 or higher. The NWS also said 75 for a high yesterday and we hit 81. They keep saying 37 for tonight but the others are a few degrees warmer. And they finally have raised their low for Monday night above 40. So hoping tonight is our last threat for a while. I didn't cover the potatoes last evening and may not tonight. I will close the frames up. I left the tops open a few nights and have got a purple tinge on some. It will go away but must be a little cooler on them than I thought. I'm trying 4-5 of the blue varieties. One called Blue Match from Tom Wagner is the bluest of any I'm growing. The stems are a dark blue. He says it is a nice slicer. One of the few slicers in the blue strain. Also has a greenhouse variety in its background and supposed to be productive. Most of Tom's varieties have good flavor so looking forward to it. His potato varieties seem to be very hardy and also disease resistant also. Jay

Just getting back to this thread - my "whee" was first a whoohoo type, since I was envisioning pecan pies, blueberry walnut muffins, etc, etc (for all the nonexistent time I spend baking!)

However, after letting the tree fully leaf out, I am not convinced it's a black walnut at all. No evidence of any sort of fruits/drupes on it, and no shells or casings below (unlike the pecan tree where I saw some shells). Tried to do the Arbor Day tree ID but got confused after the first few questions. My plant bio classes are housed in a long-disused part of my brain. Right now I'm banking on a late leafing hackberry or something, because it's nearly grown into a chainlink fence, and those are notorious volunteers around here.

Walked around the plums and peaches yesterday, picked off a few malformed or small fruits and saw some on the ground that the wind/storms knocked off for me. Will try an actual thinning this weekend, but some are so high up they will be on their own. The peaches are still only golf ball sized and hard, but have definite reddish tint to them.

Jay, Isn't it amazing those roots went that far? That's a great point that just because a tree like Black Walnut hasn't been a problem "yet", that it might not become one at any given point in time.

We left some humongous Black Walnut trees in the woods on the edge of the creek when we cleaning up our woodland some. The closest one to our house was at least 200 feet away, so I wasn't worried about it. When the beavers hit our woodland in the mid-2000s, some idiot beaver killed those black walnuts by chewing all around the bark 100% of the way around the tree. Then, I guess, the idiot beaver figured out he or she couldn't bring down a black walnut tree that big. (The trees were so big that if Tim and I had tried to put our arms completely around the tree's trunk, we couldn't have done it.)

I hope you're watching the temps tonight. It is going to be cold way down here, but I forgot to look at your map to see if y'all were going to be equally cold up there. I'm not expecting a freeze or anything, but am watching the temperatures carefully.

Mia, Well, it is just as well if it isn't a black walnut, but hackberries are not a gardeners' friend either. They are tough survivors though.

I thinned more plums today. I still need to do more, but it is still cloudy here and I won't climb a metal ladder on a rainy day. Maybe tomorrow I can finish thinning. I have thinned most of the plums to where they have exactly the "right" amount of fruit on them. Tomorrow I want to go back and take half that fruit off. My rationale? Right now I have as many fruit on the trees as I did the year I harvested over 300 lbs. of fruit and had to make jelly, jam, fruit butters, etc. for weeks. Not wanting to have to spend that much time in the kitchen again, I want to thin enough so I'll only have half as much of a harvest as last time, at best.

Of course, there's still a lot that could go wrong with fruit, and I understand that. Here in Oklahoma, it only takes one storm to wipe out an entire expected fruit harvest.

I bet your reddish peaches will be one of the ones that's naturally pretty red---and all of them I've ever grown or eaten have had outstanding flavor.

Dawn

It is surprising that I can grow anything because we have Black Walnut trees everywhere. I am not sure the roots spread out much though since they don't have to go very far for water. I have seen several kinds of huge trees just fall over when our ground was too wet and we had a little wind.

I am going to take a few plants inside tonight, my back-up plants, and my peppers, at least. One weather station shows 41 for the low, but they also said 61 for the high today and it made it to 53, so I'm not so trusting. Another shows 37 for tonight, and that is just too cold. I'm ready for this to be over.

It's interesting that the juglone doesn't hurt your plants. It must have something to do with your high water table, heavy rainfall, and fast-draining soil.

When we lived in Fort Worth, some of those huge oak trees at Trinity Park and the Botanical Garden would just topple over like that when their weight became too heavy for the wet soil to support it.

I would take in plants too. Our forecast is for 46 and I feel slightly uneasy with that. When you're in a low-lying microclimate where it often gets colder than forecast, you really have to watch the weather. I am not bringing anything inside from the greenhouse, unless the temperature just really plunges shortly after sunset. If I really was worried it would be significantly colder than forecast, I'd be out covering up plants, but I'm not.

We made it up to 70 degrees today and I think we had a forecast high of 68.

Dawn,
The NWS was saying 39 here tonight a few days ago. The others have been saying lower 40's all along. Now they are between 41 and 44. After tonight they are saying 49-50 tomorrow night and then mid to upper 50's for lows through all of next week. A week from this coming Sunday could possibly be below 50. I had plans to get out a bunch of buckets and some more WOW's this afternoon but got called back out to work. Have a good stand on my 3 early varieties of sweet corn after 10 days. I hope to get some serious planting done if all goes well this weekend. It is time to take some more chances now.

I was a little slow figuring out that the roots had spread. I've always heard the old timers say during severe droughts is when tree roots go seeking moisture and old plumbers always said that is when there was more trouble in sewer lines ect. There is no doubt that is what it is. I finished the last of my potatoes Wednesday evening. I planted all I had started from seed along with some extra's I still had to fill out a 65' row. I had planned to plant maybe 20'. About half are the Azul Toro's that Tom Wagner bred. Either I will be flooded with spuds or will waste a lot of row space. The early ones are really growing. Everything is growing well now. Hopefully we escape tonight. I think the young sweet corn will be fine. So far I'm impressed with the covering I put on the cold frame. The plants in there are responding well and out growing those in the other frame now. It sure lowers the amount of heat build up. Jay

Jay, I am so happy for you that your plants are off to a good early start and the weather is behaving itself. I bet you'll have tons of potatoes. The space planted is never wasted. If they don't grow well, you can take them out at any time and put something else there.

I hope to spend the whole weekend out in the yard and garden. Today I was worthless. The fire pager woke me up three times during the night and I feel like I didn't sleep at all, so I have been very slow moving and totally lacking in energy today. I hope to make up for that tomorrow! If all I did was get every raised bed weeded and a little mulch added where needed, I'd be happy, but of course my garden "To Do" list has a lot more on it than weeding and mulching. At this time of year, there's so much to do. We didn't get enough rain to make the soil too wet to work, so I am happy about that.

The plants that are left in the greenhouse didn't even leave it today because it was so windy here. Tomorrow I'll let them out to play in the sun all day. Mostly it is just backup tomatoes, pepper plants and the young transplants of cukes, winter squash and summer squash that I may plant next week if the forecast looks good.

So much of the garden is in so early that I don't feel an extreme amount of pressure to rush to get the rest of it done. It is nice to be "caught up" (actually, I am ahead of schedule) and to be able to be a little more relaxed about crossing things off the old To Do list.

Dawn

Well the weather report we just watched said that we have a chance of frost in Grove. Intellicast.com is showing 36 as the low for tonight. I have covered what I can cover and I may have a few things lost if we get a frost, but there isn't much else I can do. I pulled the cages off some container tomatoes and covered them with two layers of insect barrier row cover, I covered the beans the best way I could but since most are already climbing, they are hard to cover. I put flat sheets of cardboard on each side of the trellis and pulled the tops together and clipped them together with clothes pins. Some bean plants I couldn't cover. I had put in 4 eggplants this week that are about 6-8 inches tall, but I put them in the holes where broccoli plants had been eaten by something (before it was covered) so they are under an Agribon low tunnel. I have good sized squash which is also under a low tunnel and I just threw a sheet over some of the bed since the temp is already down to 42. They are saying 'frost' not 'freeze' so maybe I will be OK with most things. Most of the tomato plants have a flower pot turned down over them, but they are getting wide enough to touch the edges. The ones that got the row cover over them were too tall for a flower pot to cover.

Most of the tomato plants are looking really good so it would be terrible to have to start over at this point. I only have two plants that aren't looking good. One is a Tess's Landrace that has a million little holes in the leaves and the other is a Green Zebra that just doesn't seem to be thriving. I have a replacement for both, but hate to take them out if I don't need to. It looks like we will be in the 40-60 range every night after this one, through the end of the month. Surely we can relax when May arrives.

It may take me an hour to uncover everything in the morning, but if it is still green then it will all be worth it.

Carol,
I just looked at the NWS site for Grove and it shows 34. So hope you survived ok. Like I posted last evening the NWS had said 39 for last evening up till yesterday and raised it too 41 while the rest were 44. I had a feeling when closing up the lean to and the windows on the utility room from the way the air felt we weren't going to get as low as any said. But after getting a few leaves on some potatoes froze earlier in the week I decided not to take a chance. I covered the frames and closed everything up and start a small heater in the lean to along with a fan. The fan prevents it from overheating as with the windows open to the utility room the air just circulates back to it. This morning it is 50 here and looks like the low was around 3 and was 45. Tonight is supposed to be 49-50 and the only 40 I see mentioned in the forecasts into May. So will be doing some serious planting. I will continue to use buckets and some WOW's being I don't have enough buckets. I will use them for wind protection as much as anything. I may put a few cages up and just pull trash bags around the sides for a while. Jay

I was up off-and-on until about 4:30 this morning and I was pretty worried until after 3:00. I think the dewpoint was just too high for the temps to drop too much here. I saw that the lowest temps were at Grove and Drumright at that time (36) and that a breeze came in and some of the western temps stopped falling and actually rose a couple degrees out west during the night. (I love the mesonet. It has so many locations and is very accurate it seems with everything from temp to wind to humidity.)

This morning the mesonet showed a low temp of 33 for Grove as the lowest I saw. The low was about 38 here. I can't see past 50 ft due to fog right now.

Carol,

I hope your plants made it. It certainly will be worth all the time spent covering/uncovering them if it prevented damage or plant death. Thirty-three degrees is too close for comfort.

Jay, Y'all stayed warmer up there than we did down here. At our house, and in the greenhouse, the low was 42 degrees so we went 4 degrees lower than forecast, which I pretty much expected. I didn't think we'd hit the 30s though, so I slept well all night, and didn't even wake up once with a feeling that I ought to run downstairs and check the termperatures.

Scott, I love the OK Mesonet, not only because it provides us with a good historical record, but because it gives us a quick look at conditions around the state. My temperatures often vary greatly from our county's Mesonet station, but with us being in a river valley with varying elevations, that's not surprising. Our mesonet station in Burneyville was 4 degrees colder (38) than we were last night.

I hope this is the last cold night anyone has to cover up plants or worry about them, though I think it likely Jay will have to watch his overnight lows every now and then for another couple of weeks.

The forecast for the next week looks as close to perfect as we ever see it at this time of the year.

Dawn

I tend to look at temps at the recording sites but many times like several of us have stated before it can give a false sense of security. The conditions in a persons garden can be different and only a mile away. In fact I have a low end of my garden where I will see plants killed in the fall and bit hard in the spring and plants in the same row 70' east up a slight rise will be fine. The morning this week that a few of my potatoes on the west end got bit the lowest recorded anywhere around me was 36 I think. And I showed 38 here but in that area I had heavy frost when I opened the cold frames at 6 but no frost anywhere else. Another odd part was it got several leaves on one plant and the plants on each side was fine. Then got 2 more together but they only lost a leaf each. Mother Nature is hard to figure out. I'm hoping we can get to May 15th frost free now. If we can I should be setting fine. Jay

Sorry not to answer, but I have been gone all day. My plants are fine. Our Mesonet low was 33, but I checked 3 times in the night and the lowest temp I saw was at 7AM when it was 41 at my house. When I saw 36 and clear, I shivered a little and covered a few more things, but it was very, very, foggy here, and everything was really wet with dew this morning. I usually stay warmer than the Mesonet temp, but when the plants are already this advanced it would be a shame to lose them, so I just didn't take a chance.

Thanks everyone for watching out for me.