thunderstorms in the garden

16 years ago

Should I cover my tomato & pepper plants, lettuce & arugula seedlings and the seeds I planted in the rest of my garden during tomorrow's thunderstorms? I'm not sure if they'll flood or rot or what... What do you all think? Thank you!

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Comments (6)

mikeandbarb
16 years ago
I don't know how severe the storms will be but if the winds are high or you might get hail I'd say it's better to be safe than sorry. So cover them with pots if you can. I put rocks on top of the pots to hold them down.

We're in for storms here in the Dallas / Fort Worth area, the winds have started howling and I've been running around batten down the hatches. Not much you can do about seeds that I know of.
ccox
16 years ago
I guess my post is too late, but worth discussing anyway. Spring brings many storms in Texas, huh?
In Austin we got the "tornado watch, high winds, heavy rains, baseball size hail" warnings all day yesterday. I have clay pots to cover my transplants and just hope for the best for the seedlings like spinach and lettuce.
I guess better safe than sorry, but we barely got an rain at all. Just high winds. I'm going to keep my transplants covered. I just put them in over the weekend and getting whipped back and forth can't be good for new root development.
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Came through the overnight storms just fine, thank goodness. soxxxx - my fear isn't really the wind knocking over the pot, I can see the stone wall it's sitting losing a major load-bearing stone, pot tumbles into sunken garden, on the way down hits the bench first, then continues to smash to smithereens on the garden floor. :) Here are pics of three other urns I planted yesterday. This one DID meet with an unfortunate accident several years ago, but I loved it so much I couldn't toss it. It's terracotta. It comes apart in three or more pieces if you lift it the wrong way. I merely fit it back together like a jig saw puzzle and carefully plant and move it about. Now who's crazy? The next photos are urns I normally sit on the sunken garden floor, but decided to put them on the walls this year. They are also terracotta but have a wonderful aged appearance and when in the shady moist atmosphere of the sunken garden, develop a nice greenish color and sometimes moss! They'll lose that now by sitting in bright sun most of the day. I planted blue lobelia, peach verbena and vanilla million bells petunia. I don't have the best of luck with verbena, but the color was so pretty I couldn't resist.
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Lovely garden photos, Celeste, but I know what to expect when I open your posts--eye candy for sure!! Too bad the rain or sunshine won't go where we want it to. We are still in drought here and looks like not much is going to come down in July. I will trade you our sunshine for some of your rain--LOL. Not sure when you expect your first daylilies to bloom, but I just happened to get on the LA today and I see Robin of Earlybird has listed quite a few more DLS. What really blew my mind was the clump of 10 Golliwogs she is selling for a starting price of $10. That's a fabulous price for an excellent daylily, and you know she sends very good plants. Hope you and your family are doing well, bet the new grandbaby is getting lots of attention from everyone. I expect to see more pictures of him pretty soon. Avedon
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We had more than three inches rain from the afternoon into the night. Thunderstorms, and such. It was late morning before most of the boards on the privacy fence dried off, which is a sign of a real soaking. Usually, they dry in about an hour. It was also chilly having dropped into the high 40s last night. (That's above zero, yes.) However, breakfast on the deck was a real joy in the mild sunshine. DH was out with his tomatos and peppers and a ruler, which shows his engineering background. I tell you, the man is unbelievable. Up north, he planted marigolds exactly SIX INCHES apart using a taut line--and they better not DARE to grow out of line! When my nasturtiums (poked in the ground with a finger tip, in a random crooked pattern, I mean why NOT).....grew with "reckless abandon", he took the mower and trimmed them back within his definition of a PROPER FLOWER BORDER. Sheesh! HE likes trimmed hedges, I like loose layered unstructured. It is an indicator of the basic differences between us, and we laugh about it quite frequently. But this year, he'll be here to tend his veggie garden and it will look perfect all year I am POSITIVE. As a person who gets immersed in a project and forgets to eat, it is good to have a partner who observes a routine and a proper schedule for meals. He came in for lunch.....I told him he was a PITA.....he said, "Yeah, but I'm YOUR PITA." Time for lunch I guess. Life is good. :)
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Thank you for your kind words...I'm just lucky to have found the perfect camera for my kind of use...it is doing everything automatically and even my shaky hands can make nice pictures now...some years ago it was taking 100 pictures and maybe 5 good enough to show, but with all that new technical progress nearly every picture is perfect... and the rest is just seeing all that beauty in my small garden world and whenever the light is good running inside and getting the camera:-) and even my mobile is taking wonderful pictures nowadays, bought a new one with a 23 mb camera, same quality as my big camera... Some hostas are perfect for raindrop pictures, especially Halcyon and all its sports. The drops are so perfect on them while on others they are just splashes of water and some like Touch of Class aren't holding water at all... Happened to stumple over some baskets for hanging plants today. Have a hanging hosta garden now :-) and a single sneaker that I took home from work is now a pot...
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chickadee_42us
16 years ago
I hope my tomatoes do okay until I can get home to see what I 'should' have done. Heck the way it's storming here (Downtown Dallas) now, might not have a plant left!
carrie751
16 years ago
Check your route for going home as lots of city streets have been closed due to high water.
suburbangreen
16 years ago
I transplanted tomatoes Sunday. I hope they survived? I'll find out when I get home.

Pete
denisew
16 years ago
I drove home from my dad's today from East Texas and hit the storms on Highway 175 starting in Crandall. I was on 635 and with all the big trucks, it made it very difficult to drive, so I got off and took an alternate route. There were many streets flooded - at least one lane that wasn't drivable, but we made it home an hour later than usual. I'm just glad to be home safe. I hope everyone else out there is very careful - if you can't see the road - go around, don't drown. I know, I know! I sound like the National Weather Service, but just want everyone to be careful.

I plan on planting sweet corn, cucumbers, a couple tomatoes, strawberries and a couple blackberry vines when the ground is okay to plant. I guess the plants will be happy to go into wet soil, but there is plenty of compost, so they should be okay.

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thunderstorms in the garden

Comments (6)

mikeandbarb

ccox

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chickadee_42us

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