what is the best way to protect actively growing/producing plants of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and pole beans? all these plants are growing very vigorously, filled with plenty of unripe fruits and flowers (in beans). I appreciate your kind advise and protection techniques to keep them growing at least for few more days/weeks.

There are several techniques you can use to protect warm-season plants from a frost or freeze, but you will find that you success will vary depending on: (1) how low your temps drop and (2) how long temps remain in the danger zone.

The most effective method is to cover up your plants with a cloth material, although if all you have is plastic, it is better than nothing. The difference in cloth and plastic is that wherever your plants touch the plastic, they'll suffer freeze damage.

I use a woven floating row cover made of Reemay and it has protected my plants from temps in the mid- to upper-20s, and I believe the specific floating row cover I purchased is sold as a "frost blanket" and is supposed to give my plants 4 to 8 degrees of protection. You can use any kind of fabric....sheets, curtains, bedspreads, etc. and results will vary depending on the weight of the fabric. Just lay the fabric over the tops of the plants in late afternoon or early evening and then be sure to remove the fabric or plastic in the morning after temps are above freezing. If you have to leave for work while temps are still below freezing, remove the fabric anyway and hope for the best. If you leave the plants covered with heavy material after the sun is up and temps warm up, they can roast in the heat.

If you have time and want to make the effort, you can use PVC pipe or very heavy gauge wire to make 'hoops' over the beds and suspend the fabric or very heavy plastic (preferably 6 mm) over the hoops. We call these sort of coverings low tunnels (see link below) and they can serve as a mini-greenhouse, holding in heat and keeping frost off the plant foliage. In spring, when I am more determined to avoid losing new, young plants to a late freeze, I fill up buckets or bottles (milk jugs, two liter soda bottles, etc.) with water and place them alongside the plants under the low tunnel. If you get the buckets or bottles in place during the day, they will function as a solar collector, capturing heat from sunlight during the day and keeping the plants warm (at least warmer than they'd otherwise be) by releasing that heat at night. The solar collectors work better for me in low tunnels made of 6 mm plastic than in low tunnels made of a textile fabric.

In the absence of material to use as a cover, you can place buckets, baskets or cardboard boxes over your plants, but these materials generally won't keep the plants as warm as fabric or 6 mm sheets of plastic will. If you have leaves, grass clippings or hay handy, you can pile that material on top of and around buckets, baskets or cardboard boxes and get some insulation value from it.

Remember that dry plant roots suffer cold damage more easily than moist troots, so water the ground around your plants if it is dry. However, you don't want it heavily waterlogged---just moist. Well-mulched soil also will hold in heat and keep the roots a bit warmer.

Damage from freeze and/or frost is highly variable and some plant varieties can tolerate more cold than others. Often, even on plants that are not covered up, your first damage will show up only on the tops of the plants while lower portions of the plants will survive. So, even if you see damage on your plants, wait a few hours to see what portion of the plant has survived. I've had pepper and tomato plants survive several light frosts even if damage occurred to the topmost portion of the plants.

Here at our house, pole beans do not seem to suffer cold damage as easily as tomatoes, peppers and eggplants do.

Unless you're in a warmer portion of southcentral or southeastern OK, your bean flowers are unlikely to have time to form and mature beans before a killing frost occurs. At my house in southcentral OK, I can keep beans alive uncovered or lightly covered with sheets when low temps are above 28 degrees. Below 28 degrees, covering them up doesn't seem to save them.

Do you know how low your overnight low is expected to go? And, do you know how many hours that you're expected to have frost or temps in the 30s? The colder it gets, the worse the damage, although the length of cold exposure matters too. You might not see much frost or damage at temps in the mid- to upper-30s if the temps last an hour or two. If the temps last 6 or 8 hours, though, damage is more likely.

Finally, in the morning when you go outside after either a frost or a freeze (they aren't the same thing), if you can hose the frost off the plants, that may save them if it was just a light, superficial frost that hasn't sat long on the plants. Larry has had some success with that technique.

Watch your wind forecast too. On a windier night, the frost doesn't settle on plants as well or as long, and if it is windy enough, you won't have frost on your plants. In that sense, a windier location is helpful. If you're in a low-lying area like I am, wind won't help your plants much.

What I do when potentially damaging cold weather is forecast is (a) pick any tomatoes, peppers, eggplants or beans mature enough to use, even if the tomatoes aren't red yet; and (b) cover up any plants I want to protect and try to keep going, and (c) if I think that (b) is not possible, then I pull up the peppers and tomatoes by their roots and hang them upside down in the garage or tornado shelter where the tomatoes and peppers on the plants will continue to mature for a couple more weeks. Sometimes (c) works really well and sometimes not at all, depending on how warm the garage stays.

Got questions? Come back and ask them and we'll try to answer them.

It is always a good idea to try to protect plants in fall and get them through the first round of cold nights because often, if you can do that, you may have from 1 to 4 more weeks of nice weather. This is our 12th year in Oklahoma, and some years we've lost plants to frost as early as the last day or two in September while in another years they survived light frosts in autumn and didn't freeze/die until mid-December brought a big killing freeze. Our weather in this state is highly variable!

Dawn

I'm gonna water this afternoon and cover the squash, green beans and some of the tomatoes. I'd probably be alright just watering as we live in the highest part of OK. County and many times don't even have a frost when parts of OKC have a freeze. Just a little insurance to get past tomorrow morning then hope we don't have a killing freeze until Thanksgiving.

Happy Halloween!

Keith

Keith,

I've never had a fall like this where my overnight low keeps dropping significantly lower (up to 10 degrees lower) than the forecast, so I have no clue how long my garden will last this year. This morning's frost didn't hurt it any even though the frost was heavy enough to require it be scraped off the windshield of the car.

I was thinking of not covering up anything tonight. After all, I've harvested over 1100 peppers this month, begging the question "how many peppers does one family need?". As Tim was walking out the door to go to work, he called back over his shoulder "The row cover is in the garage...." leaving me to believe he expects me to at least cover up the peppers (and probably the tomatoes too). So, I guess I'll cover them up, but I'm really at the 'I can't bear to look at another pepper stage' so I'd rather let them freeze.

I know that a month after the freeze, I'll be glad I harvested all I could and also glad I protected the plants as long as possible, but right now I am kind of burnt out on putting up food....once the jelly closet, freezers and tornado shelter/root cellar are full, my enthusiam for preserving food evaporates.

I guess I need to water the in-ground pepper and tomato plants this afternoon. I watered the containers yesterday.

Now, I'm off to the kitchen where a couple hundred more peppers are about to be processed and "put up" for future meals.

Dawn

Dawn,

As Tim was walking out the door to go to work, he called back over his shoulder "The row cover is in the garage...." leaving me to believe he expects me to at least cover up the peppers (and probably the tomatoes too). So, I guess I'll cover them up, but I'm really at the 'I can't bear to look at another pepper stage' so I'd rather let them freeze.

Best not to mess with authority besides we all just hate it when the inevitable happens and wake up to frozen,droopy and blackened plants. Then have to wait for 2-3 months before even starting seeds in the house!

Keith

Keith,

LOL He is "the law" when he is at work, but I am "the law" in the garden. It is an arrangement that has worked for us for about 30 years.

I did cover up as much as I could with the floating row covers, blankets and sheets that I keep stacked on a shelf in the garage to use at such times.

I also stripped all the pepper plants of any peppers that were even close to being full-grown.

It is windy enough here still that the plants may not stay covered up, so I hope the wind dies down at sunset as it often does so my coverings will stay in place.

It will break my heart for about 2 seconds if the peppers freeze and then I'll get over it because we have more than a year's supply of peppers preserved in many different ways.

It has been a really good garden year, but I'm ready to let it end. Today I've been working on my seed orders for next year's garden.

Had the garden been less productive this year, or at least late to produce, I'd work harder to keep it from freezing, but it has produced well over a long period of many months so I'm happy with the "output" from the garden and ready for a break of 2 or 3 months before I start seeds for 2011.

Next year I'm planting some piggy things, including Pork Chop, in the garden. Does that make sense? Check the link below to see what kind of oddities I'll be growing next year.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Wild Boar Farms

Was only funnin', sorry I ruffled your feathers. Peace,

Keith

P.S. Remember when the whole packet of seed was 10cents, not 10cent/seed?

It is midnight and the temp is 36 at the Grove airport so I think gardening has come to an end for me. I didn't even plant the cold resistant fall things this year, so like Larry, I am kissing mine goodbye. LOL

Keith,

LOL My feathers weren't ruffled, but I just wanted you to know that the garden is my jurisdiction!

My wonderful DH is NOT a gardener at all (although he enthusiastically supports all my gardening efforts) and plants tend to die when he gets near them with a string trimmer, chainsaw, the riding lawn mower, etc.

It has taken me YEARS to train him to not touch any living plant that I have planted or even wildflowers that God planted and that I don't want mowed. We always laugh about it after the fact, but at the times he's killed a young tree by girdling it with a stringtrimmer line or cut down the coral honeysuckle with the chainsaw (instead of the adjacent volunteer mulberry tree), I wasn't laughing. : )

I remember when seeds were 10 cents a packet, and even 5 cents a packet on clearance so now everyone knows how ancient I am. I can remember when my dad bought tiny little tomato transplants in 2 or 3" pots for 5 or 10 cents at the little Greek Grocery store in our Fort Worth suburb, and I can remember paying 15 or 20 cents for 6-packs of tomato or pepper transplants. Of course, I also remember when gasoline was 25 cents a gallon and a brand new car was only two or three thousand dollars. Ah, the times have changed.

Carol, I looked at the Mesonet map last night and knew it was going to be a cold and frosty morning all over the state, and I specifically noticed y'all were already very cold there.

I didn't plant cold-season crops either this fall because at planting time I was increasingly distracted with grassfires that were breaking out here and there in August.

If I'd known then that Sept. would bring us a foot of rainfall, abruptly ending the grassfires, I likely would have planted cold-season crops, but of course, who could predict tropical storms would bring us all that rain and
even our little tornado or the three inches of rain that would fall in less than 2 hours with it.

It was a wonderful gardening year despite all the weather challenges but I'm ready to work on plans for next year, and went on a seed-buying binge yesterday. All I have to do now is wait for Baker Creek and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange to update their websites for 2011 so I can order whatever wonderful 'new' stuff they have that I can't live without, and I'm ready for 2011.

Dawn

Carol,
I looked around 6 this morning and it looked like you got hit. We only dropped to 40 this morning but the damage was really done 3 days ago. Wed and Thurs added a bit more. Likewise I will remove most this weekend if I have time and try to get the garlic bed ready. I will be posting a tomato list soon. I hope to stick to it better this year. Do know I have a few varieties that will be sent to me that I will try to grow also. I didn't try to save much as this late we will be having frost and freezes on a frequent basis. And with the continued drought most of the plants have been stressed and ready to give it up. Jay

High and Dry in Midwest City, News 9 was reporting MWC to be at 47 at 6am this morning. We got down to probably 34 or 35 but no frost at my place. I watered and covered yesterday afternoon as a precaution, but even the cannas with no water or cover were happy, even blooming this morning. I'm hoping to get at least 1 mess of green beans and several more yellow and zuchinni before as Jay puts it: "The Black Ghost" gets them. Getting several tomatoes every day especially the 4th of July, who actually are doing better than they have all season. Okra is still producing from the branches growing from the bottoms of the stalks. While I quit cutting the pods from the tops, to let them grow for seed, it's been a nice extra to harvest enough small tender pods from the branches for one last Okra omelet. A friend who loves Hot Peppers came yesterday and harvested most of the peppers but with some luck and no freezes for 2-3 more weeks may get another small harvest.

Keith

___________________________________________________________
A garden is never so good as it will be next year. -- Thomas Cooper

No freeze or frost at my house although it got cold fairly early in the night. I think the "lake effect" did its job again last night.

Dear Dawn, thank you very much for your quick reply with all those wonderful tips and techniques. I did water all beds and pots, then covered them with tarps. I went to home depot, lowes, atwoods, HFTool to buy frost blanket, unfortunately non of the store carry frost blankets. then i used plastic tarps, carton boxes to covers as much as possible. I happy to see my garden this morning, no frost, lowest recorded temp from home weather station was showing 36 degree for about an hour only. Our home is located at northeast Norman (zone 7b) with little higher elevation (Park hill neighborhood).

Now I am seriously thinking to buy few frost blankets, also thinking to dig out few plants of pepper, tomatoes, eggplants, to move into greenhouse or garage (both unheated).

Here is a link that might be useful: some pics Garden taken on Oct. 3, 2010

Keith and Carol,

Sounds like your gardens squeaked by again.

The frost here was a little shocking because it was very heavy, not patchy and scattered, and it hung around in shady spots until almost 10 a.m., although it was gone from sunny spots by 9 or 9:30 a.m.

The worst damage I've seen is on marigolds and tithonias (Mexican sunflowers) which have mild frost damage. The periwinkles, which I'd think were more tropical, weren't hurt at all, nor were the Laura Bush petunias, which do have a lot of cold-hardiness.

Biradarcm, You're welcome.

Frost blankets can be hard to find, especially at the last minute. I see them in big box stores more often in late winter to early spring, when I assume they're selling them so people who like to plant early can cover up their plants on the remaining cold nights.

You can buy floating row covers in various weights online. Be sure the one you buy specifically states it is a frost blanket or tells you how many degrees of protection it gives you, because there's also lightweight floating row covers meant to keep out insects and those are so light they do not give frost protection.

If I had an unheated greenhouse that had space available, I'd certainly dig up a few of the plants you mentioned and keep them going as long as possible. You can use buckets of water in your greenhouse as solar heat collectors to keep the greenhouse a bit warmer at night too if there is room for them.

Our weather here is so erratic that getting plants past the first few really cold nights in autumn often gives us several more weeks of production, so it certainly is worth the time and effort.

Dawn

I am anxious to see y'alls tomato lists, and those Piggy plants look very nice and sound delish. How in the heck did you ever find that website, Dawn? Have you ordered from them before? I'm probably going to order seeds from Remy because they are so economical and I don't need a ton of seeds. Ten or 15 is more than enuff for me.

I ate my first Black Cherry last night and it was great! Very thin skinned and full flavor. Today I added a couple to my Ceasar salad and once again, great!

I sure wish my other tomatos would hurry up and ripen, but they are soooooooo painfully slow, due to the cold temps I'm sure, less intense sunlight, daylength, etc.

Susan

Susan,

Brad Gates' Wild Boar Farms seeds have been around a while so I probably first became aware of them via discussions of some of the older ones on the Tomato Forum....maybe Berkeley Tie Dye or Brad's Black Heart. You can find some of his varieties at Tomatofest and I think last year or the year before that Baker Creek had one or two of them. Then, at some point, I am sure someone said that you could order seeds directly from Wild Boar Farms and I googled and found it.

The only one I've grown so far is Berkeley Tie Dye, which I really like. I'm looking forward to trying some of the others. They certainly come in all sorts of color combinations. I just hope they have good flavor. I think Jay or somebody here grew Brad's Black Heart this year, but am not positive.

Remy's is the perfect source for you since you're looking for smaller quantities of seeds. Pinetree Garden Seeds is another company that sells small quantities at great prices, but they have the more common hybrids and heirlooms whereas Remy has many of the less common, more rare heirlooms and a much larger selection too.

Tomatoes are very slow to grow in cooler temps. That's one reason I don't go to great lengths to grow winter tomatoes....because they are very slow and the flavor is not the same due to, I believe, less light and less intense light and perhaps heat. Even the early tomatoes I harvest in April or May from transplants planted in pots in early to mid-February will not taste as good as tomatoes from the same plants in mid-summer.

Dawn

I've been reading all I can on hastening the ripening process, and one thing I read said that if you bend or crimp the stem the tomatos are growing from, it will force the tomatos to ripen faster. I did that on just a few day before yesterday, so will let everyone know how that progresses.

My Currant tomatos are starting to "yellow up" or turn a golden shade, which is what they have been doing just prior to turning pink, so I've been harvesting them now. So many little ones, I wish they would ripen together in clusters - would make picking them so much easier. That's why I wanted to try that Hawaian currant/grape since it is supposed to do that, probably not all, but I'd be happy with most of them ripening together.

I'm wondering now if I SHOULD go ahead and remove the blooms at the tops, etc., to force more ripening????? What do you think? Guess it won't hurt the already develeping fruit, right?

Also read about the brown paper bag method, too. May try that as well, but I can't forget to remove the ripe ones! That would be a disaster.

Susan

Susan,

I don't know if it would work with your currants, but with Tess's, once the majority of the fruit on one truss are coloring up, I can remove it intact and the last couple of toms at the end of the truss which are fully green when I pick the truss will go ahead and color up---probably 85 or 90% of the time.

I hate, hate, hate to top tomato plants or remove blossoms because I'm always afraid that if I do that, we'll have one of those years where the plants survive until December and I'll be sorry I removed the flowers. This year, with so many cold nights already under our belts, I bet the tomato plants won't last much longer though.

I'll try to post my preliminary tomato list today, but it is probably only 75% complete. I could lie and say it is complete, but I know it isn't because Jay or Carol or Gary or some of the other tomato afficianados here will post their lists and I'll be reminded of varieties that aren't on my list that I love or that I want to try, and my list will start growing. No matter how hard I try to cut back on how many I grow, it is a losing battle. I always say I'll "cut back next year" but I rarely do it.

Dawn

Heehee! I know about the "tomato lists". But, we all have good intentions. It's just hard not to make them "gooder".....

Today, I noticed the currants are starting to really turn, so not much longer for them. Also, the Burpee Super Beefsteak and Rutgers are turning as well. The cherries are a bit behind (Black and Supersweet 100), so I don't know what's gonna happen with them. Whatever, I have decided to just harvest what I can when we get a freeze warning, which, as you say, could be any day now.

The fall tomatos were just so gorgeous, and much nicer than the spring ones. But, I only started out with the Rutgers and Jet Star (it bit the dust in August), and a later planting in May of the Supersweet 100. By that time, it was too late for the Supersweet 100 to really set many tomatos - the heat was on. The fall planting I did in July did great and those are the ones that look soooo good right now.

I'm happy with the container soil I've mixed, the fertilizer I used - I will increase how often I fertilizer next year. Happy with the watering I did - not overwatering cuz I do have a heavy hand in general. Happy with the containers I use, but do intend to purchase some grow bags in 20 gallon size, but will still keep to 8 (okay, okay, maybe 9 or 10) plants.

I've really enjoyed growing tomatos much more than I thought I ever would, with an eye toward growing them for me, anyways, and not the hornworms. Altho the hornworms still have their place in the garden, it's just on the Datura now and not the tomatoes, so we're all happy. I did grow pots of basil around the plants, and it did seem to help with some of the pests. The grasshoppers did not touch the tomatoes, no white flies, no flying anything except for the happy little honeybees, bumble bees and skippers, that loved the Basil blooms. Did have some problems with the beet armyworms and the tomato fruitworms, but they remained manageable by handpicking and damaged only very few fruits. All in all, container growing worked out very well for me and I look forward to next year's growing season.

Susan

do anyone have guess how long this season go? will tender plants (tomatoes and peppers) keep till the end of November and/or December for Norman/Central Oklahoma?

Susan,

I'm glad your first year of growing tomatoes for consumption was so rewarding. Be careful or that list of 8 or 9 or 10 will become 14 or 16 or 18. lol

Biradarcm,

We could guess, but there's no way of knowing. Normally, in central Ok, most folks see their first freeze in late Oct. or early November but it can vary wildly from year to year.

I've linked the website of the Oklahoma Climatological Service that shows various maps showing freeze dates. Use the menu at the left-hand side of the page to navigate to the various frost maps. Also, if you're on higher ground with good wind exposure, your first freeze or killing frost may occur later but if you're in a low-lying area, it may occur earlier because cold air tends to settle into low areas and we refer to those areas as a 'frost pocket'. Our home is in a frost pocket so I know we'll freeze earlier here than the average freeze date data indicates.

It is rare to have tomatoes or peppers still producing later than Thanksgiving. We had one year here in the last decade when the first killing freeze/frost didn't occur until mid-December in parts of southern, central and eastern Oklahoma, but a year like that is very rare.

If you can successfully cover them up and protect them from cold air and frost, you can keep them going for however long you can protect them and keep them from freezing. However, as the daylength shortens in Nov. and Dec. and the ground temperatures cool, the fruit ripens very slowly and also is somewhat less flavorful than fruit grown in warmer temps and more intense sunlight. At a certain point, temperatures drop so low that the plants, even if still alive, are unlikely to flower and set fruit.

Peppers and tomatoes are not cold-hardy or frost hardy so once they're hit with seriously cold air, they'll die.

Dawm

Here is a link that might be useful: OCS Maps Page