Hey everyone! Well, as you have probably heard or experienced yourselves, we have had over 13" of rain this month! Tired of cloudy days, and have come to the conclusion that has probably contributed to my germination of tomato seeds. As of today, I have about 45 containers (out of 120 planted) that have germinated (finally) - most do not have the true leaves yet. I'm on my way. About 2 weeks ago I re-sowed (sp?)60 containers, so maybe that helped. Do you think I winter sowed them too early? I started the first week of January sowing tomatoes, as well as flowers. My flowers are doing beautifully! What is a mystery, as I found others have experienced, this time last and previous years, my plants were well on their way ready to plant. At this point, I am so thankful to see little seedling ready to mature and plant in my "victory garden." You have all been so sweet to post your findings; I'm so grateful. :) P.S. May will all remember the people in the South in regards to the devastation in the last couple days.

I finally took the advice of folks on the rose forums when they said, "Roses are not tomatos. They'll do just fine." and didn't protect any of them. I threw a blanket over the fence where my Sweet Autumn clematis grows, and a flocked vinyl tablecloth over the peonies (Lord knows why). The smaller, emerging perennials and the Endless Summer hydrangeas got overturned pots on top of them, and the wintersown stuff spent the night in the stairwell. ...I'm glad to say that everything was just fine. I pulled a very few crispy leaves off the roses, but they seem to be unharmed. The slow-to-wake, pickier-than-advertised ES hydrangeas actually seemed to like a night in a quasi-cloche, and leafed out all the way up two canes! The forecast has nights in the 40s and 50s for the next ten days... after that there's just another 10 days to go, and the average nighttime low is 49-50, with no record lows of 32 or below after that (although it's gotten darn close and I believe all that stuff about late frosts and global warming, so I'm paranoid!) I'm knocking on wood while I say it, but I think we've escaped the worst. Hail! Egads! Ankle deep hail no less! That'd have me keeping my starts under lights til June...

I'd leave them covered. If you are worried they won't be able to breathe and might roast, use a rock or stick to prop up one little section of the potst tomorrow as you're leaving for work so hot air can escape if it builds up under the pots. I've left plants covered with plastic buckets (unintentionally because I left to go someplace and forgot to uncover them before I left) after a cold night, and they handled a sunny day with highs in the 60s just fine. By the time I got home, it was so late in the day that there was no point in uncovering them, but I peeked under the buckets and looked at them and they were fine. I covered up 90% of the 4 garden plots today and it all is staying covered until Friday or Saturday. I hope to get the remaining 10% covered tomorrow morning. We ran out of daylight, and ran out of energy too. It can be difficult to decide whether to leave something covered or uncovered. Trust your gut instinct. It usually is right. Dawn

Bon, We have a deer herd that visits regularly and 3 or 4 of them are not as afraid of me as they once were (although the rest still scatter when they see me), but they still don't try to assert any dominance. This one was not one of those. Clearly it was a deer that figured out the stuff growing inside the fence probably is tastier than the stuff growing outside the fence, but I don't aim to ever let it have a chance to verify that for sure. We have an 8' high deer fence around both the front garden and back garden and they seldom breach the fence....and, when they do, it is because somebody left the gate open. The regular deer herd comes at night and checks the back compost pile for goodies. Sometimes on canning days, I know they are in the woods watching and waiting because I'll throw a bunch of stuff on the compost pile and go back indoors in the middle of the day. When I go out to the compost pile again late in the day, the stuff I carried out earlier already has been gobbled up. I wonder if they watch every day or if somehow they know when I am canning. It is a wonder I get any compost at all. If the deer start getting too needy I take a dog or two out with me. That puts an end to the deer problems for a while. Being chased through the woods and pastures by a highly energetic dog will make the deer lie low for a while. The two young dogs we took in around Thanksgiving are kinda on the small side of being medium-sized dogs and they love to run and bark and chase. They'll likely be a good deer deterrent for years to come. I think I hardened off all my plants 2 or 3 times. We'd patiently work our way through the daily process of increasing exposure an hour each day, and a big cold front or snow storm or prolonged rainy spell would come along and the plants would be inside for a few days. We'd start over again with the 1 hour on the first day, 2 hours on the second, etc., and finally be back about to the same degree of hardening off that we'd had the first time, and along would come another long weather disruption. I've never had to start over with hardening off plants as many times as I did this year, but we're finally at the point where everything is fully hardened off. It feels like it took me 6 weeks to get it done, and it may have. Krista, Seedlings aren't all that hard to raise once you understand what they need and you get it down to a routine. The problem is that when you transition them outdoors, they need to start with a low amount of exposure (I often put them in dappled shade for the first few days, and then give then 1 hour of sunlight the first day, two the second, etc.) and work their way up incrementally. IF we had weather that was half-way cooperative, you could harden off plants to outdoor temperatures, sunlight and wind in a week or two. But, with weather as erratic as ours is at this time of the year, it always seems to be a one step forward, two steps back kind of process. This year it has been more challenging because of the roller coaster weather. Some years it is a piece of cake. A lot of people pamper their seedlings too much indoors, giving them excessive heat, moisture and fertilization which produces big lush plants that have a much harder time harding off. I do the opposite. I close the HVAC vent in my plant-starting room to keep the room from being too warm and cushy, preferring to raise them slightly cooler than our indoor air temperature. I run a fan 24/7 so they get used to wind exposure. I water only enough to keep them growing, and to keep the soil moist, and never water so heavily that the soil is soggy. I don't feedseedlings at all until the plants are old enough that they clearly need to be fed. What I get is tough plants who haven't lived a real cushy life and are eager to escape from the house to the outdoors. I generally don't have much trouble getting them hardened off, but I am home all day and can watch them carefully and move them from full sun to dappled shade if the weather is too hot and too windy for the condition they are in at that time. This year it has been mostly the opposite problem----just finding them enough actual sunlight that they can harden off has been a challenge. The sign of success with hardening-off your seedlings? When you put them in the ground and that don't suffer transplant shock, don't look unhappy and don't struggle. That's when you know you had them in the right shape to go into the ground at the right time. I define the right time as the point when both air temperatures and soil temperatures are right for that specific type of plant. While hardening off this year has been much more difficult than usual, the plants did great when I put them in the ground so all the struggle to get them hardened off was worth it.