Plastic may not always be your best choice of peotection. From Harvest Supply: Plastic can be used to protect plants from frost, but it�s not the best or most effective material, and some expert gardeners warn against it. Plastic or vinyl materials do not breathe, causing moisture to get trapped inside. If the temperature drops low enough, the increase in moisture presents a greater threat to the plants. Instead of plastic, try using natural fabrics like cotton or linen, an opened burlap bag, or newspaper, as a covering to protect plants from frost. A fabric covering will allow moisture to escape but will still protect plants from frost by preventing the freezing air from coming into direct contact with the moisture. Bed sheets work well for covering large plants and shrubs, as well as young sprouts. Newspaper can be used on low-growing foliage, but won�t stay on top of larger plants well. In a pinch, you can use plastic sheets, but be sure to remove the plastic covers early in the morning to let the increasingly warmer daytime air reach the plants. If the threat of frost is prolonged and temperatures remain low during the day, be sure to use a fabric covering. When there is a threat of frost, cover your plants before sunset.

Over the years I have done hundreds of jugs/containers and had them in all exposures. The only concern was that those in the western/southern exposure needed to be watered more often in the spring. During the winter the seeds/soil freeze and thaw with germination coming in the spring, some seeds will germinate earlier than others. Containers in a southern exposure and against a stone wall may have a warmer micro-climate than the rest of your yard and may germinate early so may need to be watched during late freezes. Some people have had containers with mold/moss in them from being too wet. You might try to search for "mold/moss in containers" to see how they handled that. The containers that I keep for two winters (astilbe, anemone, clematis, actae) often have moss in them but the seedlings grow up through the moss so I just let it be. I had very good germination with delphiniums two years ago but just a few this spring. I am trying them again next winter and hope for better germination. Delphiniums need a cold period.

Dorothy, My experience with planting in the ground is exactly the same as yours. Not only did they begin to rot without sprouting, but something was eating the peas underground because they would entirely disappear overnight without a trace. You and I do sprout our peas in similar ways and plant out at about the same time even though I am a lot further south and it would seem like I could plant earlier than you, but I can't....and I blame it on my cold microclimate. If I planted much earlier than you, I don't think I'd get a crop any earlier. Amunk1, One thing I love about gardening is that everything we do can be viewed as an experiment. Try something one way, learn from that and then the next time you can try it a different way in order to improve upon the previous effort. My entire garden is just one big experiment every year with many smaller experiments going on within the big experiment. Dorothy and I both have been gardening a long time(and I won't rat out her age or mine by admitting exactly how long) and I guarantee you I do not do things the exact same way now that I did them in the 1980s or 1990s or early 2000s, and certainly not the way I did things in the 1970s when I was very young and tended to love my plants to death by overwatering them. It is important to not get stuck in a rut and keep on doing things the same way you did them in the past. There's always room for improvement and it is fun to try to improve your garden's appearance and productivity every year. Realistically speaking, here in OK, sometimes we are happy if we just manage to keep our gardens alive. Peas grow best and taste best when they mature before temperatures begin regularly exceeding 75 degrees. That statement sounds so calm and logical, but Oklahoma weather is not calm and logical. It is a wild roller coaster ride, and I find it rare for us to stay cool enough long enough for my snap peas to grow well enough that they are producing much of a crop while the daytime highs are still in the 70s. In that sense, this is looking like a really good pea year. The issue, though, is that just because we have highs at our house in the 70s this week, that doesn't mean they'll last long. We could be in the 80s next week and the 90s the week after that. That is why is it so important to plant early. Technically, the ground usually is a bit too cold for peas to sprout during the OSU-recommended planting time. They will sprout if conditions are perfect, but if we are too wet or too cold, they can rot before they sprout. That's why a lot of us sprout our peas indoors by soaking them in water for a few hours, wrapping them in a paper towel or coffee filter and popping them into soil-less mix as soon as the peas have small sprouts. I have done that every year I've grown them here except the first year, when I planted them in the ground and they sprouted and grew...and then it got hot and they died before making very many peas. The odd thing is that while they won't sprout easily in cold soil, they grow well in it. So, we start early and baby them through a few bitter cold nights (by covering them up) because it is the best way to "guarantee" a crop, though you really aren't guaranteeing a crop so much as improving your chance of getting one. In areas of the country that have a slower transition from winter's cold to summer's heat, gardeners can just wait for the soil to warm up some more and then plant the pea seeds directly in the ground. In OK, where we can literally go from too cold to too hot in one week some years, we don't have that luxury. I deviated from sprouting the pea seeds in paper towels this year because I wanted to see if they would sprout in soil-less mix as easily as in paper towels. They did, but were a little slower. I started early, so that wasn't a big issue. Had I been running behind on seed-starting, I would have sprouted them first in paper towels to speed up the process. I learned to grow almost everything in the ground from seed first (except tomatoes, peppers and eggplant which need to be started indoors far in advance of the transplant date) and then learned how to start seed indoors for transplants. I think that helped because I already knew when everything should be put into the ground, so all I had to work on was learning how early to start them indoors so they were the right size at transplant time and learning how to harden off plants grown indoors, which I learned in Texas in the 1990s. I had to change things a bit when I moved farther north to OK because our nights stay a lot colder a lot longer. With greenhouses, there is a learning curve. The smaller the greenhouse,l the harder it is to regulate the temperature and the light. I feel like the shadecloth made growing in the greenhouse so much easier. It also helps to have a fan to give your plants good air movement for good plant health while in the greenhouse, and I think that Dorothy has a heated propagation bench, but I don't. I'm going to assume you've seen the OSU Garden Planning Guide that has planting dates for cool season crops in winter/spring and warm season planting dates in spring/mid-summer. So, instead of linking it again since we link it often in various 'new gardener' threads, I am going to link the Fall Garden Planning Guide. You can look ahead to what you can plant in summer (and a few things in fall) for a fall harvest. I usually start my seeds for my fall tomato plants in May so I can put the fall tomatoes in the ground in mid-June through early July. It seems silly to a non-gardener when they look at the beautiful tomato plants in my garden in June and then look at the tiny seedlings I'm growing for fall. Not being gardeners, they don't understand why a person starts new plants for fall. If they were gardeners they'd understand that July and August are really tough on tomato plants here and that fresh, new plants that just went into the ground in early summer have more vigor and do better in fall than older plants that are running out of energy. For a long time....and I mean a couple of decades or further back, I carried over the spring plants through the fall but once I tried with fresh plants for fall, I was amazed at how much better they do. Now, see, that is the sort of experiment that pays off. I never would have known how well it would work if I hadn't tried it. One of the wonderful thing about gardening in Oklahoma is we have a very long growing season, although technically it is broken up into smaller sub-seasons. That means that we get a second chance in fall with many cool-season and warm-season plants. Keep in mind, we often have to plant in ridiculously hot and miserably dry weather in June through August so we can be harvesting in September through December or later. The fall season really is a fall harvesting season because the fall garden planting mostly occurs in summer. Technically, the fall garden planting season starts with tomatoes going into the ground July 1st. That means you need to start your seeds 6-8 weeks before that so you'll have transplants ready by July 1st, and I often put them into the ground a week or two earlier than that, usually to fill a space made empty by the removal of a cool-season crop that is finished producing. I personally haven't had much luck with snap peas in fall. Often, just about the time the heat drops enough that the plants grow well,, we turn significantly colder and we get too cold too early and the blossoms drop off the plants. I keep trying though, because maybe one of these years I'll get it right. Some crops, though, like kale, cauliflower and brussels sprouts do better in the fall than in the spring. Just keep planting and plugging away. Even when you encounter obstacles, every experience is a learning experience. Every learning experience makes you a better gardener. Nobody is successful with every crop every year. I'm happy if 75% if the crops I plant produce an edible harvest. We just have too much odd weather and too many pests to reasonably expect 100% success every year. Remember, too, to enjoy the process. Don't worry, don't hurry....and don't forget to stop and smell the flowers. To me, the process of gardening is more important than the end result. I try to enjoy every day of the journey, and then whatever crop is there at the end of the journey is just a bonus. Gardening is very rewarding and can add great joy to your life, but some years it brings a lot of stress and I think we all find ourselves too garden-stressed at times. If we had perfect weather and no pests, what would we talk about? We'd just sit here saying "the broccoli is going bonkers, the potatoes are perfect, the lettuce is lovely and the tomatoes are terrific" and it would be so boring. Generally, gardening in OK includes a certain amount of, hmm, let's call it "drama", and it often arrives in the form of late freezes, late snow, sleet, hail, tornadoes, derecho winds, microbursts, an occasional haboob, wind-driven wildfire, graupel, thundersnow, flooding rain or, conversely, months with almost no rain at all and tremendous drought. Sometimes I think to myself "if the weather was perfect, what would we discuss here?" Not to worry, though, because it never will happen. Our weather is many things, but "perfect" is not one of them, but we just keep on keeping on anyhow. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Fall Garden Planning Guide

I just checked the UMass Landscape Message since I know they show soil temperatures of different regions in Massachusetts. The November, 2005 Message isn't out yet - they report monthly at this time of year. I looked into the archives for the winter of 2004-2005 to try to find out when the soil would be frozen, and I was very suprised to see that the report for January, 2005 showed cold, but not frozen soil (readings taken on January 5). The next report, February, 2005 (readings taken Feb. 9) showed most regions had frozen soil. I went back to the winter of 2003-2004. Unfortunately, the earliest reading was January 7, 2004 and the ground was frozen. No reading for December, 2003. Who knows what this year will do to us, but this implies that we've got a good month, maybe two ahead of non-frozen soil. Claire Here is a link that might be useful: Landscape Message Archives