Go back inside, make yourself a nice cup of tea, start a fire in the fireplace if you have one, sit down and read a good book. Forget about the garden. Forget about the freeze. Whatever you do, don't run around trying to 'help'. Our last frost date is May 30th. Even in a normal year, practically everything is leafed out before the last frost. Everything that people would usually call a spring flower is flowering before the last frost. They can handle it. If they couldn't they wouldn't be growing and blooming now. If you want to worry, the temperatures you should be concerned about are if it gets into the low 20's. That is cold enough to cause damage, and it is early enough that those temperatures are not out of the question.

Being the original poster and seeing that this thread is taking a murderous turn I have to tell you all that I think the cayenne(and the blood meal and something called scoot squirrel which is basically spray cayenne) worked. I think that once I did that no more bulbs were eaten. However, many many were eaten last fall after I planted and this spring before I treated. But I'm trying to dwell on the positive and the fact that my sweet little scilla are blooming and my tulips are budding and I have been temporarily distracted from shooting squirrels. Now, if I could just do something about my neighbor who has decided to "divide" the hostas between our houses(that have questionable ownership) and hurl dirt and roots and sod clumps all over my garden and the tiny little annual reseeds that have started coming up. Now THAT I can get homicidal about...Maybe not, but it is really making me crazy. I mean she has an entire yard full of things to do. She is not a gardener and has no gardens or plants save the one little coral-colored impatiens hanging basket that hangs on her front porch and dies every summer due to too much sun and no water. Anyway, I'm trying to dwell on the positive. Does anyone else have insane neighbors who are driving them to be likewise? I guess this is the time of year that people come out of their houses for better or worse...

Capoman, maybe your right,but My thai are so hot they burn for hours, I could never consider even eating a slice of one again:) They have turned red the fastest. They really out did any of my other peppers. Maybe because the Thai was so amazing I am just putting everything else down. Even the cherry has gave me red peppers but just not enough for me to ever grow it again either :) Guess I am a bit selective. So far next year I will grow Jalapeno,ThaiSun,orange hab. Not that I am giving up on Cayenne, I just don't have the space for something that won't produce amazingly fast. And Again, I am sure it was the seeds in which the plants came from.

Alana, I'm colder than your zone so some of my experience might not apply, but once the roses (and bulbs) start growing, there's nothing I can do to convince them to stop. They might get a bit frost nipped here and there, but unless you get weather returning to the 20's for several days in a row (and that's all day, not just a brief tip in the night), you should be fine. Apparently roses when they first start growing in spring have nature's equivalent of "antifreeze" in their canes and they're more insulated against cold snaps than they are later in the season. Roses like the rest of the garden are reading a multitude of factors that you may not be aware of (e.g. day length, soil temperature, moisture), and they usually know what they're doing or can recover from it if not. As for pruning, I prune off obviously dead wood as soon as the crocus and such come up, which is before the official forsythia blooming start to pruning season. Dead wood is dead, and the rose doesn't know you've cut it until you get into live cane. If you're worried that it's too early to prune, leave an inch or so of probably dead wood on the tips, and it'll just be a haircut to the rose, not a stimulus to start growing more cane. Once you can tell that the rose has indeed given up on that cane, and you feel better about stimulating growth, you can do a second round of pruning to get rid of those stubs. In my zone, we always have to do 2 or 3 rounds of pruning to get rid of cane that was only temporarily alive in the spring, so this isn't unusual for us. Bottom line for me is I prune off dead wood as soon as I feel like being out in the garden, and then do a more detailed prune once the leaves are definitely emerging. I figure if it has leaves it's going to be subject to weather variations with or without my pruning, and I want to get it done before planting season starts. Cynthia