pam ... let me sum it up for you .... YOU DONT KNOW WHAT COLD IS .... lol it was 48F yesterday .... and last night down to 7F with a 25 mph wind.. -15F wind chill ... ground thawing one day ... enough to let the 6 inches of snow disappear .. no clay here ... and the ground frozen solid today ... QUIT worrying about dormant plants being.. what you call cold ... until you get below zero .. which most likely wont happen in z8 .. and if it does... YOU WILL HAVE A LOT OF OTHER PROBLEMS TO WORRY ABOUT .... other than your darn trees... lol ... 78 of 80 .. good work ... and perhaps it didnt register ... but forget about a couple hot days.. this time of year .... ambient AIR temp is not relevent .... its SOIL TEMP .... worry about a week long heat wave.. but a couple days ... most likely isn't going to warm the soil significantly .... as noted .... the wetter and colder the better .. subject to your hands aching from being too cold .... in spring.. if the soil is workable... and soil freezing is past .... its time to plant .... for me .. that is april in z5 .... i will still get frosts thru late may ... and maybe even a snow in april .... but the ground will not refreeze .. so again ... ambient air temp is not an issue with dormant trees .... a very hard late frost can be a problem .... but it isnt worth worrying about ... IMHO .... all you have to worry about .... is that bare root stock gets into soil or medium ... they are NOT to be left standing in water for too long .... TIMING IS EVERYTHING .. and mail order sources mail them at the proper time ... the good ones do anyway .. lol ... just get it done... good luck ken

Rickey, Of course it was Fred. Who else his age is out driving around visiting gardeners in the middle of the afternoon? LOL If you see Billy Fred, do see if you can find out what he knows because he may know more details. Nowadays, when I ask Fred "who" he is talking about, he often can't remember names and will say something like 'you know...that guy that lives over yonder' and, of course, I have no clue who he means. Having said that, I hope that when I am Fred's age (and I'm not sure what it is but think right around 90?) I still get around as well as he does. Sometimes I do have to get Billy Fred to tell me who his dad is talking about because, while Fred always seems to have his facts straight, he does have trouble remembering names now and then. I had wondered about those goats....about how he keeps them safe because I've never seen any kind of guardian dog like a Great Pyrenees out there with them. I heard a loud growling this morning from the woods oddly enough (and I was inside the house and it sounded like it was right there in the room with me!) and it about scared me to death. As far away as your house is from ours, it is odd we've both heard that growling sound recently. It isn't like we're so close geographically that we'd hear the same growl at the same time. I've never heard this sound before and I pretty much thought I'd heard everything there is to hear around here. The dogs were going nuts in their dog yard, and I ran downstairs and didn't see a thing, but the cats were on the porch wanting to come inside. After that growling sound, I canceled my plans to work in the yard. James, I feel like much of what you say is true, but we have both good and bad government employees and always will. I know sometimes the local wildlife people seem to say whatever the 'official' story line is but their eyes and body language are telling you something else. Our local law enforcement officers are pretty good about telling us to 'do what you have to do' to stay safe, because they know they can't be everywhere at once. They also come as quickly as they can when called, but with only 1 or 2 or 3 county deputies/reserve deputies on duty at a time, their response time can be frustratingly slow. Game bird, I promise, if you tell me you see three dinosaurs crossing the road, I'll believe you. And. on a funnier note....Chris was 15 when we moved here and had a huge iguana named Alex. He built Alex a nice roomy outdoor pen, but somehow Alex would escape and run around although he always came back to the cage when he was hungry. We alerted our neighbors, and I showed Alex to Bill one day. We were watching Alex from the road and he climbed to the top of the pecan tree, which was then losing its leaves for autumn, so you could see Alex very clearly. At that point he was about 5' long. When Bill saw him, he said he needed to warn his wife and daughters because he feared they'd about run off the road and wreck their vehicles if Alex ever ran out into the road in front of them. Bill was afraid the women in his family would think Alex was an alligator. Carol, I do think a lot of people know exactly how to play the system. Tim and Chris both work at D-FW Airport, which is incorporated just like a city, and has a large Department of Public Safety consisting of police, fire and emergency medical personnel employees. Their department has several hundred employees and most are wonderful, but there are a couple that of virtually worthless. How people like that keep their jobs is just beyond me. Dawn

There's not a lot that will sprout in typical December weather, but you never know. The way that our weather is seesawing wildly back and forth (highs in the 70s and 80s today, highs in the 30s on Monday) makes it hard to predict. The warm days may help keep the ground temperatures warm enough for something to sprout. Sometimes spinach or some other greens will sprout (albeit slowly) at this time of the year, but then if we turn very cold while the plants are young, they may not survive. My soil temperatures at 4" are averaging around 50 degrees. In northern OK, the mesonet soil temp 3-day average is considerably cooler---in the lower 40s. The colder the soil temperatures, the slower most seeds are to sprout at this time of the year. Maybe kale or collards would sprout. Sprouting is just part of the battle because they will be vulnerable to cold temperatures until they have been exposed to enough of them to build up some tolerance of the cold temperatures. You might be able to get one of the usual winter cover crops to sprout, but I've never planted any of them when it already is this cold (cold in general, this weekend's temperatures give us a false sense of warmth..... and it won't last). I can tell you what has sprouted in the soil in my garden the last couple of weeks: henbit, borage (it is likely to freeze Monday night, or since I left the garden gate open, maybe rabbits will get it before it freezes), catnip, chamomile, larkspur, Texas bluebonnets, dandelions, and a couple of poppies. I started to say that I usually don't see poppies popping up out of the soil until December, and then I realized it is almost December. At this time of the year, anything that sprouts in my garden serves mainly as food for various wild things.....song birds eat the lettuce, rabbits eat everything else growing in the ground, but the weeds, herbs and wildflowers often recover from being nibbled. Nothing eats the Swiss chard because it is in containers too tall for rabbits to reach. I only grow winter lettuce in tubs in the greenhouse because it gets eaten if grown in the ground. Sometimes I see squirrels in the garden in winter, but I can't say I've ever seen them eating anything. You could consider this an experiment and toss various leftover cool season crop seeds onto the ground and see what sprouts. When I did that one year, although it likely was in early November, I got lots of various kales, cabbages and collards, as well as beets and turnips to sprout. Some of them made it through most of the winter, freezing out probably in late January, but others survived and never froze. I think that year that the collards and cabbage, and a few beets (the greens froze down to the ground, but then regrew in February) were the best survivors. Have you planted your garlic yet? If not, it isn't too late for it as it will sprout eventually. I think the best chance of getting something to sprout and grow would come from sowing seeds of some of the most cold-hardy "other" greens that are less commonly grown and eaten here: claytonia, mache', creasy greens, and maybe even arugula.

I live in PA. Zone 6b. This fall, I topped off all my raised beds with a bedding mix consisting of topsoil and compost and also built two new beds. I don't really want to cover the soil with leaf mulch before planting in the spring, so I thought that covering the beds with black plastic over the winter would be better than leaving the bare soil exposed. I also thought it might help the beds warm up earlier in the spring, help suppress early spring weeds, and maybe extend the life of the pine wood bed frames at the same time. I don't want to do anything to harm the earthworms or other beneficial organisms in the soil, however.