Dawn, I seen that, and I received my onions Wednesday.

I spent half the day yesterday tilling (with the tractor) in some not so ready compost. I was hoping to plant my onions this weekend until I seen the Tuesday forecast.

I guess I will hold then till it passes as I don't think they would fare to well with just being newly planted.

Oh, by the way, I'm following you, Lol

Hey Robert, As soon as I can figure out how to follow someone, I'll follow you.

I have had my onions a while now and have been sorta dragging my feet. I was busy working compost into the growing area, but I did not feel a sense or urgency to get them planted....that whole instinct thing I guess, and I try to listen to those instincts. Then, I think it was Wednesday night, our local TV met said the word "snow" and that sealed the deal for me. I figured waiting another few days to plant them won't hurt.

I have mulch and I have heavy-duty frost blankets, but I just feel like I'm not going to gain much by planting now and then having to drag out the row cover. Of course, not being able to plant them is making me crazy, but I'll just spend some time today getting the potato-planting area ready.

Our forecast isn't awful, so I could plant them, but I keep thinking that there's just no good reason to expose the young onion plants to two very cold nights. My bigger worry isn't that we'll hit 18-20 degrees. It is that we often go 4-10 degrees lower than forecast, and if that happened, those little onions would be shivering. This morning we dropped to 27. Our forecast had been for 31.

When Tim heard the forecast, he immediately said we should wait until next week, and I agreed. I'd rather be safe than sorry.

Click on his name and a box should pop up, there's a follow button there.

Thank you, Lisa!

i learned my lesson last year with the early march hard freeze. I lost 50-60% of my onions. I am waiting until march to plant mine. They may end up smaller but the quantity should make up for it.

I just got my first dixondale onion order and I am so excited but I am going to have to wait a little while for the weather too.

kim
Dawn I am following you too but what exactly does that mean?

Kim, I have no idea. : )

I expect some of the folks here who follow one another on social media platforms like Facebook and TwItter can explain it to us.

My brain functions outdoors in the yard and garden, but put it near any high-tech anything and it explodes.

I likely was the last person in America to get a cell phone, resisting having one forever and ever. Now you and I may be the last people in America to not really understand what following someone electronically means or what it involves, or what it does or does not do. Does it "do" anything? And, yes, to anyone reading this, I was happy living in the 20th century, but too much about the 21st century just baffles me. Tim and I got a Smart TV in 2013 and still use it only as a TV. I know it is supposed to do other things, but we've never figured out what they are.

By the way, if you are signed up for the Dixondale Farms monthly newsletter, it arrived in my inbox today. I thought it was a great one and addressed a topic I don't remember seeing Bruce address before.

And, aren't your Dixondale onions lovely and green and fresh? Gotta love it, especially when you look at the ones in the stores. I know the onions in some of our local stores have been sitting out there in the boxes outdoors since right after Christmas. Bet they aren't green and fresh looking any more.

Dawn

If you follow someone on Pinterest, their pins show up on your "home" screen, which is kind of designed to be things you are interested in. If you "friend" (yes, a verb) someone on facebook, their posts show up in your "feed" (the posts you see when you go to facebook). In both cases you can further filter some of it. I suspect it has more to do with Houzz original format, where I believe people post pics of remodels or projects. I am not sure how it wll be used in GW. However, having two people follow each other in order to email is meant to protect you from random spammers or stalkers.

Thanks for the explanation!

Thanks Amy! I am on FB but very limited. I have a smart phone but don't use it to its fullest capacity ( I got it to take pictures of my grandson). I do not have a real tv just an old one that is hooked up to vcr to play an occasional movie for my little man. I personally haven't watched anything in over a year.

I hope everyone finds the new place and gets comfortable here

Kim in TX

Dawn, I was the last person on the planet according to my son to get a cell phone in 2012. It was his senior year and he thought he was so deprived.

kim

Kim, the camera is all I really care about. My husband uses... is required to use his for work. The influence is amazing. He was all like "I gotta get you one of these!" and I'm like "Why???"

Well, you know.. [blah blah] ..or for any emergencies.

But the police and fire station are across the street?

You could take good pictures of your garden!

LOL

Kim, Okay, I got a cell phone a few years before you, but long after all my family members and friends had them. I mostly use my phone for phone calls and texting, or to check the weather radar when I am in the garden and the sky is turning black on a thunderstorm type day. A smartphone has so many more options than I'll ever use. Until it develops the ability to pull weeds and diagnose plant diseases, it lacks the options I really need.

Oh, and we do have a good dispatching app on it so I can get VFD calls dispatched right to my phone instead of just to the fire radio.

Bon, lol lol lol. Taking photos is not even on my priority list, and I think everyone here knows that. Every year I think that maybe this year will be the year I find time to take and post photos, and every year, it just doesn't happen. There's just not enough hours in the day.....but maybe this year there will be.

So...my onions, and lettuces, and carrots (some), and Romanesco cauliflower and a few French breakfast radishes are planted. Well-watered, then mulched with chopped-up leaf matter and watered again a few days after that. I wanted to put floating row cover down, too, but my dog is still enamored of that. I'm taking my chances with fingers crossed!!

Sharon, I imagine they'll be alright.

Our forecast has improved down here. A night that had been forecast to hit 20 degrees has been changed to 30 degrees. At 30 degree lows, I wouldn't be worried about cool-season crops. I hope your weather forecast has moderated a bit like ours has. Southeastern and much of southcentral OK have worse weather coming than we're supposed to see in Love County.

It was 80 degrees here at our house today and the frogs were croaking and butterflies were out too. I worked in the garden on and off all day, mindful of how precious a day like this is in the month of February. My onion plants were chilling in the shade while I was working in the sun. I'm planning to plant them on Wednesday.

Bon I got mine for the camera. I take at least 100 pictures a month and get a groovebook so I can keep track of the garden and littleman. they both grow so fast.

My onions are in a very cool room waiting patiently for me to get them out. several people in the area already planted but some are waiting like me.

not sure when to put them out but will just play it by ear I guess.

kim

The UPS driver crunched through the snow to deliver my onions to the front door today. It will be awhile before mine can go into the ground.

It's going to be at least a week and a half before I even consider planting my onions. Next thursday's low is currently set at 14...

Dulahey, I'm with you. I'm not tilling. So, I guess mine will get in as they get in. I've a ton (actually a ton and half) of prairie hay to use as insulation. Longer range forecast suggests overnight temps won't stop freezing until March 1. of course, reality could be much different - usually with a 2 or 3 days reprieve in there, somewhere. I need to get some soil temps to be more familiar with what's really going on. Might be safe to do some surface cultivation. Right now, I'm seeing the benefits of tilling. But I also have areas that are proven with the method. I have very healthy soil. It's easy to work by handy, albeit slowly. It just takes time.

I get what I get...
I get what I get...

Carol, Well at least the UPS driver could still find you. How he been delivering onions to someone in Boston, their roads and homes might be completely buried beneath the snow at this point.

Dulahey, That is a truly horrible forecast. I feel like 14 degrees is too cold for late February (not that we get to choose what kind of weather we're going to have). I haven't looked back at least year's weather to see if our February weather is colder than last year, but to me, it seems like it is. I don't remember everyone having to hold their onions a while before planting because of cold temperatures last year.

Bon, Ignore the temperature forecasts because they are not very accurate long-range. Statistical/historical records suggest that freezing nights will continue sporadically until at least late March through early April depending on a person's location in Oklahoma. Onions can tolerate temperatures down into the lower 20s if mulched and well-covered, although technically they can suffer damage or die when we have a hard freeze, which is defined as 28 degrees or lower. I seldom have lost onions at 25 degrees (mulched but not covered with row covers) but have lost them at 20-22 if the soil was wet. I've lost them in wet soil in the upper teens even with floating row cover.

At our house, within the last week, our overnight low has been running 4 to 10 degrees lower than forecast, so I just look at our forecast overnight low, subtract 5 degrees, and figure that is about what our overnight low will be.

My soil temperatures are good, but not as good as they were last week when the overall weather was warmer. Raised beds warm up more quickly so my soil temps tend to run higher than the ones recorded at our mesonet station. If I was foolish enough to plant based solely on soil temperatures (and you know that I am not), I could have planted tomato plants in the ground last week or the week before because our soil temperature was in the 50s for 4 or 5 days in a row right around the time our air temperature was topping out around 80 degrees. I haven't checked the soil temperatures this week but would expect they are back in the 40s again. My older tomato plants are sitting in the greenhouse where the 4 purchased plants now are either blooming or about to bloom. My started-from-seed tomato plants are indoor on the light shelf but I hope to move them out to the greenhouse before March arrives.

Thanks, Dawn. I'm certain you're repeating yourself for my sake. I hadn't had time to look up the old threads. I will easily ignore the forecasts, as you suggest, cuz .. yeah. They need to get in the ground. I'm thinking it'll be good for me to play around with the thermometer in the soil. Seems some areas are prone to being cooler than others. Like some of yours, it's on a long gentle westward slope with gentle dips throughout. Peering at the ice yet to melt is gives a clue what's shady or cooled by wind. I think. Learn a bit more every year, I suppose.

Usually I am waiting for the soil to be dry enough to work in, but this year we have had very little rain. Of course, now we have snow which isn't melting much because our temps have stayed so low. At least it didn't fall on a saturated ground so it should soak in fast once the temps warm up (if that ever happens).

Dawn, yes I am grateful not to live in Boston, but they didn't have to get heavy snow for me to feel that way. LOL Yesterday the neighborhood streets crunched as a very few cars went through in the morning, but by afternoon the asphalt streets had started to get a little slushy although the ground had not. Al and I were looking out the window and I said, "If we still lived in northern Michigan we would be out with shovels clearing the neighborhood streets so we could make it to a road that had been cleared". Then we both just laughed as we sat here and waited for it to melt. LOL He has been out everyday except the first one, but I have just stayed inside. Our streets are OK once you get out of the neighborhood.

Well, we know how to make it snow. Just get all ready to plant onions and Mother Nature rolls out the snow-making machine.

I tried to work in the garden early today, but the mulch was frozen together in big chunks. It looked like it was held together by mortar made of frost. It was the best time of the day to work because even though it was very cold (31 degrees when I went out there), there was no wind and the sun was shining so it didn't feel that cold at all. A couple of hours later the temperature had risen about 10 degrees but the wind had really increased so it actually felt worse out there. You can't do much with frozen mulch, so I just came back inside and figured maybe the mulch won't be frozen solid tomorrow.

I'd like to finally get the onions in the ground, but every time I look at the forecast, I think to myself that I should wait 3 or 4 more days. I guess I should at least wait until the mulch thaws out. It probably had thawed out by afternoon, but by then I was busy with other stuff.

My onions still are heeled in and biding their time in a box of barely moist potting soil sitting on a table in the greenhouse. I might plant them tomorrow but it just depends on how the day itself unfolds.

Bon, I used to push really hard to get everything in the ground as early as possible, but decided I get better yields if I am more patient and wait a bit longer. Potatoes, for example, aren't at risk right now even if the weather gets really cold, but if I plant them now, they will sprout, grow and get big, and then freeze when we get really cold weather in April. Sometimes waiting just a couple of weeks makes a huge difference. I don't like for them to get so big so early that it is hard to cover them up in April when we have the inevitable late freezes and late frosts. We always have a late frost, freeze or sleet/freezing rain/snow around Easter, so I don't plant more than I want to cover up until the Easter freeze is behind us. Covering up tons and tons of stuff gets old really fast, so I try to keep my urge to plant under control until a little later in the season. I don't mind covering up lots of rows once a week, let's say, but doing it 2, 3 or 4 days a week would get old really fast.

We usually stick close to home in ice or snow, but might make one trip to the store mostly just to get out of the house because we have cabin fever. We cannot get anywhere without having to cross a couple of bridges at the very least, so most of the time, it is just easier to stay home and not risk sliding off into a ditch. To go to Marietta or Thackerville, there's 2 to 4 bridges to cross in either direction, and then to go further to either Ardmore or Gainesville, there's tons of overpasses and too much traffic on the roadway for the icy conditions anyhow. It seems smarter to just stay home.

There's snow in our forecast for next week, Carol, so I'm guessing your forecast is even worse than ours.

I underestimated the family's addiction to those delicious Yukon Gold last year. Bill just convinced me to plant #25 of seed potatoes.

lol. Planting is the easy part. Let's see how excited he is when it is time to dig up all those potatoes this summer. : ) That is the only thing I don't like about growing potatoes---digging them up in the heat.

The Yukon Golds are really good, though, so I understand why he wants you to grow more of them. Having your first fresh-from-the-garden potatoes is almost as incredible as having your first fresh-from-the-garden tomatoes. I love the full earthy flavor of fresh potatoes.

He was thinking they'd last until the fall. Says his grandfather in Missouri dug them up at that time. lol Then, I told him about the storage issue and left him in charge of that. lol *snort

In a hot, humid summer here (especially in heavier clay soil), the potatoes sometimes will collapse into a stinking wet mess that almost looks like a whitish-yellow pudding and that stinks to high heaven. That's why we have to dig them up before it gets that hot here. Some years, it doesn't happen at all. There's not necessarily any rhyme or reason I can figure out because it doesn't happen all the time, so I think it has to be a combination of heat, humidity and maybe some sort of fungi or bacteria in the soil that becomes active in high heat and humidity. A couple of years ago, I planted tons of potatoes and harvested almost 400 lbs. I dug and dug and dug for days. By the time I had reached the last raised bed of potatoes, which contained about 60 or 70 plants, I was finding a rotted, stinky mess underneath about 50% of the plants instead of harvestable taters. It was hit or miss---one plant was fine and the next one had rotted taters underground. However, some years I miss some of the tiny potatos and they survive the whole summer, autumn and winter, and sprout in the spring. I think this might occur because the small potatoes are lower in moisture just because they are smaller and less mature.

So, a plan to leave potatoes in the ground all summer long is risky and can result in losing some or all of the harvest. And, if you have gophers or voles, guess what they will eat when the weather is hot and all those nice, yummy, moist potatoes are sitting there underground waiting for them....where you cannot even see the underground varmints nibbling on them. I usually don't have voles bother anything in my garden until at least mid-July because that apparently is the time when their regular food supply is exhausted.

In the years that I have grown potatoes, digging them has not been an issue because the plants are always so ugly, I am ready to get them out of way.

Since this thread has gotten derailed(insert laughing smil(y)ie{however you spell it]), how do you store onions and potatoes long term?