I bought 2 tomatoes in 4" pots Friday and forgot to bring them in last night. It went down to 37 last night. They were up by the house, on the patio near stone and concrete that surely kept them a tiny bit warmer. Does that cold a temp stunt their growth? They don't appear to be damaged.

Amy, if they don't look damaged then they probably aren't. If they were pepper plants and went that low, I would guess that your production would be much less. Even with tomato plants you were flirting with danger at those temps since that is very close to the possible frost range.

Amy, it'll prolly just stunt them temporarily. They recover and kick off. I pull stuff like this all the time. In fact, I just sunburned my seedlings.

Amy, I agree with the others that if they don't look damaged, they're probably fine. Tomatoes will tolerate occasional exposure to low but above-freezing temperatures. Sometimes they even bounce back from some frost or freeze damage, even if they freeze down to the ground. Of course, sometimes they don't.

Bon, I sunburned all my plants and I didn't do a thing. All of them are growing outdoors where they are outside from roughly 8 or 9 a.m. until about 5 p.m. My homegrown tomato seedlings have been outside in full sun since the day they sprouted, so it isn't like they weren't hardened off. So, what happened? It rained. We had two days of clouds and one day of rain. The plants were outside in their usual spot on the patio table. Of course, for those two days they mostly were in cloudy weather, so not direct sun. But, so what? Plants in the ground endure cloudy weather. Anyhow, a few days later, they had the unmistakable signs of sunburn. It freaked me out. The tiny seedlings showed it first. The larger plants showed it a day or two later. I think they all likely will survive, but right now the small ones look like crap. Maybe I should have kept them inside on the light shelf on the cloudy days instead of taking them out, but if I'd done that, I would have felt like I had to do the whole hardening-off routine.

Now, there have been times when plants that were either hardened off or partially hardened off had to stay indoors on some cold days and they lost their hardening-off during that period and burned, but I've never had completely hardened-off plants that have been outside in full sun for their whole lives abruptly sunburn after a couple of cloudy days the spent outside for the same number of hours as they were out on sunny days. Wind, however may have been a contributing factor. That's one of the crazy things about gardening----you may think you've seen it all, but there's always a surprise ahead. I hope this is my only surprise for this year, and likely it is not.

I resisted the urge to put tomato plants in the ground today because we are forecast to go to 37 degrees tomorrow night. So many of the early plants are in bloom, and I didn't want to get the catfaced tomatoes that can occur when fruit sets in cold temperatures, so my plants will be safely in the mudroom at night, which almost never drops below 60 degrees, until the cool nighttime lows stabilize a bit more.

Dawn

Could I plant out my ws tomatoes and keep protected they have already sprouted and some about to bust out of the water jugs

Kim, In the ground? Only if your soil temperature is staying at 50 or above at the same depth at which the roots would be growing, and 55 is better, and 60 is best....and by staying, I mean 24/7. If you put them in cold soil, even though you are protecting them from the cold air by covering them, they still will have their roots in cold or cool soil, unless your soil has warmed up to stay already. I don't know that the cold soil would hurt them, but they likely would just sit there and sulk and pout and wouldn't really make any growth worth mentioning until the soil temperatures warmed up.

On the other hand, if your soil is staying warm enough and you think you can cover them up enough to protect them from freezing or sub-freezing temperatures, frost, sleet, snow, freezing rain, thundersnow or hail (anything is possible in our region in March), then go for it.

Much depends on what you use to cover them, as some materials hold in the heat so well that it warms up the soil beneath the row covers more than the soil that is outside the row covers (the greenhouse effect). Depending on the weight and thickness of the row cover, you lose sunlight. I have a great "supreme" (their name for it, not mine, though I do like it) frost blanket weight row cover that gives at least 10 degrees of cold protection. So, if my plants would be safe down to 22 degrees, why not just put the tomato plants in the ground now? Because a textile row cover that heavy and thick also excludes about 75% of the sunlight. That's not an issue if I can uncover the plants every morning and cover them up every night, but what happens if we get a week of sleet and snow and the row cover is over the plants 24/7? They would suffer terribly from only getting 25% of the sunlight. You have to weigh the advantages vs. the disadvantages.

My soil temperatures are all over the place, from the 40s to the upper 60s and lower 70s.....and not staying consistently at or above 50, 55 or 60, although it would take only a few more days like today to get them back into that range to stay.....maybe. It only takes a couple of cold nights or cooler days for my soil temperatures to plunge from the upper 60s to the low to mid-40s. If I thought my soil temperatures were warm to stay, I'd have plants in the ground already. And, to be honest, every single day that passes, I am more likely to put some tomato plants in the ground, but whenever I decide to do that, it will be only a few. It is too early to risk them all.

Dawn

I put the first four early tomato plants in the ground late yesterday afternoon and intend to put the rest of the early plants into the ground today. I'm looking forward to not having to lug those pots in and out daily now that the worst of the cold has passed and the soil is warm enough. After I get those early purchased plants in the ground today, it will be several weeks until I put our main crop of homegrown seedlings in the ground. They are still small and I'd like them to be bigger before I put them in the ground. There's also a limit to how many rows of tomatoes I'm willing to cover up on cold nights....and it is a small limit because the covering late in the day and the uncovering the following morning chews up time when I could be and would rather be doing something else.

Dawn, the reason I looked at this thread was to see if you had planted. LOL We are having nice warm weather, but I am sure we will still have more cold. I bought a six pack of tomato plants and have them in 6 inch pots doing the carry-in-and-out routine. I will probably put them in early also, and I bought them with the idea that they could be either early or sacrificial, depending on weather. My transplants are still tiny and not doing great this year. My normal growing place is occupied this year, so I don't have the right conditions nor enough room. I will do what I can with what I have to work with and hope my plants improve. Hope you planted a lot because I may need a few. LOL

Carol, I have 11 early tomato plants in the ground. The two largest early plants, both heavily flowering and with several tomatoes each (the largest is about the size of a walnut), remain in their large pots. I am hedging my bets. It seems warm enough that I could put those other two in the ground, but I just haven't. However, I haven't carried them indoors the last couple of nights, so they are at least adjusting to the cooler nighttime temperatures than what they've been having indoors. I do think of the early ones as sacrificial since the world wouldn't end if they froze, and we'd still have all our own home-grown plants, but since we are used to getting ripe fruit beginning in April, I am pretty sure Tim would consider it a major tragedy if the early plants froze (which I've never let happen since I bought and started using row cover).

I did plant a lot of seeds and it seems like they all pretty much sprouted and I need to pot them up, which I've been putting off. It is hard to sit still and pot up a couple hundred tomato plants when I could be outside working in the garden. There ought to be plenty of tomato plants for me to bring to the Spring Fling. I should have lots of time indoors to pot up and also to start more seeds in flats endlessly this week since Mother Nature apparently intends to dump a lot of rain on us. We need it, but I really would rather have more time in the dry garden, than time indoors watching it rain.

Rain is a two-edged sword. While the plants need it and will respond well to it, the gardeners will have to deal with the mud and the mess. The good thing about the rain is that more green-up will help keep wildfires from spreading as freely. Things seem worse at the NW end of our county, but down here in our area we are already greening up at a rapid rate and we haven't had a bad grass fire or wild fire in our fire district in a while, though we've gone to other districts a bit here and there to help them with theirs.

It probably is just as well that it is going to rain. If I was able to keep working in the garden every day this week, I'd probably go crazy and start planting corn or beans or something else. I've really planted everything I can plant at this point, except for carrot seed, and I have been holding back on planting it until we got more rain....and now I'm glad the seeds haven't been sown yet. We're forecast to get 3-4" this week, and my carrot seed would be floating downstream if it already had been sown.

The 2 tomato plants I'm still holding are in 4-gallon pots, and 4 of the ones I planted were in 8" pots that they were outgrowing. The others were in peat pots, with multiple plants per pot, so I had to separate them out and plant them individually. The ones in peat pots were impulse buys over the past 2 or 3 weeks and I never potted them up like I did the original 6 plants I bought back in early or mid-February. It is nice to have tomato plants in the ground, but it means I have to watch the forecast more carefully. In recent weeks, we've routinely dropped 4 to 10 degrees lower than forecast (not every night, but often enough to keep me on my toes), so I have to look at the forecast low and then try to estimate exactly how low we'll go based on that recent history. It doesn't look like we'll have any low temperatures that are cold enough to worry about this week. Last year I think our last freezing night was on March 9th or 10th, and it seems impossible to believe we'd get that lucky two years in a row, so I expect a few freezing nights or at least frosty nights remain.

We're still a little over two weeks away from our average last freeze date, and it generally is recommended to plant tomato plants two weeks after that date, so my early plants are definitely in the ground very early by those standards. If my garden didn't slope so steeply that I canot use Wall-O-Water plant protectors (they fall right over and roll downhill as you're filling them), I would have put plants in the ground in mid-February with WOWs and I would have gotten away with it because the nights haven't been too cold for plants planted in WOWs. A neighbor of ours in Texas used to put his tomato plants in the ground in WOWs in January. Those were the good old days. His early plantings always made me feel I was behind, but I gardened on a slope there, so couldn't use WOWs there either. What is it with our family and sloping ground? I wouldn't know how to garden on flat land.

Dawn

I have some WOW's but rarely use them because the birds land on them to drink water and then they collapse taking the plant down with them. I might have trouble finding mine since it has been several years since I have used them. I may try to put a couple of plants in the ground next week, but I put 5 gallon water jugs (with the bottom out, and top open) over them. I think when you reduce the wind, it makes a difference. I can always add extra cover if we get really cold.

I had no idea birds would do that, but I do keep a birdbath filled for the birds so that they'll leave my plants alone. I do think that reducing the wind matters.

I think I will plant my 2 early girls out next week when it quits storming and warms back up. I can not wait any longer! I can cover them with a bucket at night if it gets to cold. And those 2 I can pick up at the store if they freeze to death. I always grow early girl because they produce all summer. I am ready to get them started producing!

I say go for it! I am starting to feel like winter weather is over and done, but I know that just because I said that, we will have more cold nights.

One year (I think it was either 2007 or 2008) when we had weather like this, I had my entire garden planted, and it had been planted a while and some of the tomato and pepper plants in the ground were knee-high or taller and just as wide when a big cold spell was forecast to return. This was before I even had floating row cover and, actually, this cold spell is the reason that I now have floating row cover (and hoops).

For two days in advance of the cold spell, I worked like a fiend, scavenging fabric, PVC pipe, wood, etc. and rushed to the store, bought two rolls of 4 or 6 mm clear plastic and some zip ties (which wasn't nearly enough) and duct tape. I built temporary single-row high tunnels over the tomato plants, which were already caged in 7-8' tall tomato cages, and temporary low tunnels over everything else. It took every minute of the two days I had because I didn't have enough material and was constantly rummaging through the garage, shed and house looking for something else I could use to cover up "one more row" of plants. When I was gone, my garden looked like rednecks had run amok building hideously ugly tunnels patched together mostly from scavenged material. No two tunnels looked the same. None of them looked impressive, but.....

We had three weeks of temperatures close to and below freezing and no sunshine to speak of that entire time. We had wind. We had cold, rain, drizzle and sleet and a small amount of snow. Worst of all, we had a garden full of extremely ugly structures covering the rows. I couldn't stand to look at it. While some tunnels had clear plastic, others only had clear plastic on the top, and for the sides I had used landscape fabric, sheets, blankets, quilts, tarps, old curtains....you name it, I used it. In the end, I don't think I lost a single plant, but I also don't think the plants really grew during those three weeks as the air temperatures and soil temperatures had turned back so very cold. Finally, the big cold spell ended and I was able to take down my structures and remove all the 5-gallon buckets and cat litter buckets of water I had used as solar heat collectors to help keep the plants from freezing. My garden had survived, and the weather was fine after that. I've never forgotten that year and the frantic rush to cover up everything so it would survive a prolonged cold spell.

Being older and wiser now, I put hoops over every bed when it is planted (except for trellised crops like peas) so that I can quickly throw row cover over the hoops if the weather turns ugly after a bed is planted. I leave the hoops up until sometime in May or even early June, removing them once the plants are taller than the hoops (some of my hoops are 8' tall at times because I use EMT as legs to raise a hoop taller than, let's say, tomato cages). With a couple of kinds of plants that do not recover well from hail (like onions, for example, or corn), I put deer netting over the hoops shortly after planting and leave it there until the worst of the hail season has passed. I have enough actual row cover on hand to cover every bit of the front garden, and at least part of the back garden. I always have an extra roll or two of plastic in the barn, and a couple of tarps, and some zip ties and duct tape. What I learned from the year of the redneck low and high tunnels is that my gardening life is less complicated if I am ready for whatever the weather might do, to the extent that you even can be prepared for the unexpected.

Nowadays, if the weather turns back ugly, I at least have the material on hand to cover the plants with proper row cover and hoops so it doesn't look so sad and pathetic and rednecky. And, of course, since I'm fairly well prepared now, we've never had another big, prolonged cold spell return after I have planted much of the garden early due to nice weather and nice soil temperatures. We have had an occasional cold night when frost threatened and I had to at least cover up tomato and pepper plants, sometimes corn and beans. Maybe that sort of prolonged late cold spell never will happen again, but if it does happen, I'm prepared. If it is going to happen, this could be the year because it has been warm very early this year, and winter wasn't much of a winter. That tends to be the kind of year when we have a very late very cold spell.

I never really feel safe from a late cold spell until after the pecan trees and mesquite trees have leafed out, because they rarely are fooled by early warmth. Maybe once a decade they leaf out too early and get nipped back by a late freeze. So far, the mesquite and pecan trees here look fully dormant. Down in Texas though, not too far south of me, the mesquite trees are greening up, which I view as a good sign.

If the weather turns back very cold now, I really only have two small 4' x 10' raised beds planted with warm-season veggies (tomatoes and peppers), herbs and flowers. Covering them with row cover would take no time at all. All the cool-season crops should be able to handle any return to cold weather that we have.

I still have no intention of planting any more tomato plants until it is much warmer and the risk of late cold weather has diminished---so probably not until after Easter. I started my own home-grown tomato plants as late as I reasonably could precisely so I wouldn't have them get too big too quick and sort of force me into putting the main crop into the ground early. As long as I have a few early plants in the ground, I don't feel compelled to put all the tomato plants in the ground.

The internal battle with myself now is over the planting of corn and beans. I keep thinking that as warm as the ground is, I "could" plant corn and beans as soon as the rain ends. I am confident my reasonable, adult self will win the battle with the gardening devil sitting on my shoulder and urging me to plant corn, beans and squash early, and it is likely I won't plant them too early, but that doesn't mean that I don't want to do it. It probably is a good thing the ground will be too wet to garden for a while, because that alone will force me to behave myself. I think I can keep my urge to plant more under control until we start having daytime highs in the 80s. After that, all bets are off.

At the rate things are going with this rain, maybe I ought to be out in the barn building an ark, and loading it with two kinds of every plant.

Do pests like squash bugs awaken earlier in weather like this? My collards and kale that overwintered are bolting. Last year I wanted seeds from the collards and they took FOREVER to get there. This year I wanted another picking and oops, too late. Purple sprouting broccoli is sprouting. I don't even know when to harvest that.

Sometimes they do, but there's lots of variables involved. I sort of think the overwintering pests respond to air or soil temperatures, but I'm not sure. I know that I see cucumber beetles in March of most years, but occasionally not until April and maybe once every so often in February. I haven't seen any cucumber beetles yet, by the way, even though February was abnormally warm most of the month. This year I haven't seen a lot of pests yet, except for a handful of grasshoppers and tons and tons of cutworms and crickets. It could be the only reason I've seen the cutworms and crickets is because I scooped up the compost (last year's mulch that has decomposed) out of the pathways and put it on the raised beds, and the cutworms and crickets were in that compost. Likely they overwintered there, and I may have woke them up early by disturbing the mulch/compost.

Sometimes I have been able to interrupt the bolting of overwintered greens (including lettuce, collards and kale) by cutting them off about an inch above ground (as if harvesting, using the cut-and-come-again method) and then feeding them with a water-soluble fertilizer high in nitrogen. This can kick them back into vegetative growth for a few more days to a few more weeks, though it doesn't always work. It must be that it works if I catch them early when they are showing the first signs of bolting, but not if I don't do it until the bolting process is well under way.

With the purple sprouting broccoli, do you remember the variety and the DTM? There's different kinds of purple sprouting broccoli, and one of them is a very long DTM variety meant to overwinter while you treat the other one just like any other broccoli, so my answer might vary a little depending on which one you have. Generally, though, with a purple sprouting broccoli, you can harvest anytime the small side shoot type heads are a usable size. They stay small just like the side shoots you get off of heading broccoli after you harvest the main head, so don't keep waiting for the shoots to get big because they really don't get big.

This is a long DTM PSB. In fact, I THOUGHT it was a short DTM one and winter sowed it LAST year at this time, so it's been almost a year! I read that you can eat the buds from all brasica including collards so I am going to cut them and pull out those plants. I have some smaller plants that are just starting to grow to harvestable size and some babies in the green house, so we will have plenty. Going to save seeds from the kale plant, since we loved it.

Oh, well, if it is the long DTM one, then it absolutely must have exposure to cold temperatures before it will even think of producing sprouts for you to eat, so now you know that at least. Unfortunately this one also bolts very quickly once our daytime highs are exceeding the 70s. (You can eat them while they are in flower, you know.....).

If you want one that you can plant and harvest within a few months without overwintering, you can grow Summer Purple or Santee. Both will produce sprouts in spring/summer from a late winter/early spring planting or in late autumn/early winter from a late summer planting.

Since you like kale, I suspect you would love Frank Morton's kale-broccoli cross called Purple Peacock, which he bred by crossing a large green broccoli variety with two different kales. I haven't grown it yet, but I plan to grow it either this coming fall/winter or next year. I was going to grow it this year but never got around to ordering seeds and then we started getting hot so early that I put growing it on the back burner, figuring it was going to get too hot too early for me to order seeds late, plant them and get it in the ground in time to beat the heat. In the photos I've seen, it is spectacularly gorgeous. I know that its seed is available from both Territorial and FEDCO (and probably many other places as well), and it is Territorial's three photos that I loved, so I'll link that page below. It is so gorgeous that it would be worth growing even if it wasn't edible. It is just a bonus that it is so beautiful and edible too.

You can eat many parts of different brassicas. Usually the use that is most common is because it is the one that is the less objectionable to the general population. For example, I think the leaves of all common garden brassicas are edible, but some people find the leaves of, let's say, cauliflower or broccoli, to be so strongly flavored that they don't like them, while other people do find them tasty.

Dawn

Purple Peacock

That is a beautiful plant. This is my Arkansas Purple Kale that has been so pretty all winter.

I agree that often people will say you can eat such-and-such and I find that the such-and-such is not something I'll ever try again. I'll try just about anything once, though. I'm not a huge fan of spring mustard greens, but I feel their flavor less strong and more acceptable after frost has hit them in autumn and winter. That's true of lots of the brassicas, though.

The one thing about crops that are said to not go bitter when they bolt or to not bolt at all in heat....I have found that regardless of how they are described, our heat seems to either make them bolt or to make them bitter, even if folks further north who just don't have our heat insist it doesn't happen up there. It is sort of like those tomato varieties said to produce all summer despite the heat. They may produce all summer despite the heat in some places, but usually not down here unless we are having a cool summer like last year or an exceptionally dry, hot summer when relative humidity is very low. With tomto fruit set, I can get fruit set in exceptionally hot weather if the humidity is low, but not if the humidity is high (which causes the pollen to clump and not move around adequately within the flower). I also have learned that some varieties of lettuce won't bolt nearly as easily/quickly if you keep the soil evenly moist, but will bolt quickly if they get dry when it also is hot. It's hard to remember all the things that have to be done, often differently with each crop, to maximize the harvest in difficult conditions.

The collard buds were acceptable, maybe just a little stronger than broccoli or just different than broccoli. I just steamed them. Added to stirfry, or sauced up with something, they would be tasty I think. It's nice to know you can get one more meal out of the plant. This one is going to make a dozen more sprouts in a couple of days. After I cut those it will be a big plant for compost. To be honest, we have harvested more from that collard group (there are 2 close together) than any of the broccoli. probably might be more bitter if it had waited longer to bolt? One day I will figure out how many I need to plant for us and probably have more room for other things.

I see all these facebook posts where people are growing in tiny containers and they're so happy with them. I'm thinking "I'd have to water that every half hour." Every day I learn a little more.

Yes, people growing things in tiny containers must not be in our climate with our heat and wind. It doesn't matter to me what people do elsewhere because I have to deal with the actual conditions we have here. I generally don't even read that much about how people do things in other regions because what they do is often very different from what we have to do here, and I don't have a Facebook account and likely never will. I feel like Facebook would just chew up more time than I have available.

Dawn,

That is why this forum is such a blessing to me. When I first moved to Texas, I made so many mistakes and had so many failures simply because I did not know that most gardening advice in books is NOT written for here at all. I'm still learning so much from all of you, but I am not discouraged like I was in the beginning, because I understand the challenges.

Michelle

Michelle, I guess I was lucky to grow up in Texas, gardening under tough conditions. If you can garden in Texas (and Oklahoma can be just as challenging, if not more challenging) successfully, you can garden anywhere. I know each region has its own unique challenges, but it just seems like Texas and Oklahoma have so many of them....and the weather can change so rapidly that it makes your head spin! Of course, if your head is spinning, so are the heads of your plants. Where else can we be 20 degrees at night, 80+ degrees the next day, and facing strong winds and wildfire in the middle of the day followed by thunderstorms with hail, tornadoes, torrential rainfall and floods.....all in one day? It makes me crazy.

Because I first learned gardening from neighbors and older family members, I understood how to garden here in this climate long before I ever read a gardening book. The first time I read a gardening book oriented towards a cooler climate with milder summers, I laughed until I cried. It was just so different, and all I could do is shake my head and say something the equivalent of "they be crazy". lol

When I found Dr. Sam Cotner's "Texas Vegetable Book" in the 1980s, I was simply elated. Finally! I had found someone who knew how to raise veggies in Texas and had written a top-notch book about it! I was so relieved. I'm now on my third copy of his book, having worn out two previous copies to the point that they were falling apart. I practically can recite portions of it from memory. After that I found books by Neil Sperry, Howard Garrett and Greg Grant. The great thing about gardening in Texas is that it is such a big state that many gardening books are written specifically about gardening in Texas, and since OK is so similar to Texas, those books can be used by us Okies too. There's also a handful of books written specifically by Oklahomans for Oklahomans, but I've never seen one strictly about edible gardening in that category. And, I'll never find another book about veggie garden that means as much to me as the late Dr. Cotner's book----you never forget your first love, and his veggie book was the first veggie book I ever loved.

One thing about Dr. Cotner's book (remember, this was very long ago, pre-internet) that makes me laugh now is that he mentioned floating row covers and their usage. I read that and laughed and told Tim...."that will be the day when I buy some kind of fancy fabric to cover up my garden plants...it never will happen". Well, never say never. Roughly 15-20 years after I said that, I bought my first floating row covers and I do not know how the garden and I ever survived without them.

Dawn

Dawn, thank you for the book recommendation.
I didn't grow up with vegetable gardeners, so it's not in the blood or the genes for me. I envy you your childhood. What an education that must have been!

My husband was in the Air Force, so I spent twenty years in military housing, growing a few flowers, but nothing substantial because I knew it wasn't "mine," and a full garden wasn't usually possible nor practical. I can tell you that Texas is the most extreme (extreme heat, extreme drought, extreme rainfall) place we've ever lived. So this has been the first time I've been able to set down roots, and I do love it, but there has been a HUGE learning curve! The drought years made it even harder, but it was a needed reality check. (Early on, we were stationed in England, and I always thought I'd have an English cottage garden.) Every failure has been a lesson learned, and I'm slowly getting there. I love every day in the garden (except when it's 108*).

Michelle

Since I have never really gardened until I came here to the panhandle and had to deal with drought and wind I had nothing to base my hopes on except 1 year I helped with a huge garden in PA . We watered once and it rained nice amount weekly. I knew Texas was way different but the wind here is what keeps me guessing. I can "thoroughly water" a seedbed and less than an hour it's completely crusted on top from the wind.

No matter it's my most favorite place to go. In fact I am headed there now to get some more rows shaped. Plow coming for the big part later. I am hoping this will be the last time we plow.

Michelle,

The book is great. At one point it was out of print and impossible to find and the used copies you could find online were considered rare books and priced accordingly (in the hundreds of dollars) It later was reprinted, and Dr. Cotner himself said that given how many pages the book was (around 400 I believe) and all the photos it contained, it was so expensive to print that he himself didn't blame the publisher for not wanting to put it back into production because it was very expensive to produce "nowadays". He also said at that time that it would be impossible to write/publish a book like that nowadays because of the cost, but you know, the demand for it was so high that additional printings did happen well after he said that. That was likely in the late 1990s or early 2000s when he said that, and I guess publishing costs had soared since it was first published.

Kim, If I was gardening in place that was windy like that and it was a permanent place where I was going to be long-term, I'd plant a windbreak around the garden, but 15-20' from the garden so it didn't shade out too much of the garden ground. Windbreaks can be lifesavers when gardening on flat, windy land. If it wasn't a permanent place where investing in lots of large evergreen shrubs or trees was possible, I'd grow a triple row, densely planted, of some sort of large annual plant that would at least provide some windbreak....maybe some of the tall grain-type amaranths (harvest the flowers before they go to seed or you'll have 1,000,001 amaranth plants each year forever after), or some of the more densely-branched tall sunflowers or a thick, dense planting of field corn (its stalks are sturdier than sweet corn), ornamental corn or sorghum. I have used broom corn interpanted with hyacinth beans as a wind break by my yard is somewhat sheltered by woodland on three sides, so the 12' tall broom corn stalks didn't break. Because they get so tall, I do not know if they would work in your windier area. I think the wind might break the stalks or cause them to lodge.

If the two of you do not read the local Texas gardening magazines (Neil Sperry's "Gardens" (now only available, I believe, as a digital online publication) at his website, and "Texas Gardener" (believe it is based in central TX but covers the whole state), I recommend them highly. Texas Gardener has a stronger focus on veggies, but does cover other topics as well, and everything Neil Sperry writes and publishes is pure gold for Texas gardeners.

The last time I bought a new copy of Dr. Cotner's "The Vegetable Book", I purchased it directly from Texas Gardener Press, one of my favorite sources for books about gardening in this region. Here's a link to their book page:

Bookstore at Texas Gardener Press

I am out in the garden for a large portion of every day that the weather allows it at this time of the year. Once the real heat sets in and the temperatures are in the 90s and above every day, I spend much less time out there, mostly only harvesting fruits, veggies and herbs, watering, or cutting flowers for bouquets. By then I hopefully have enough mulch on the beds that weeding is not need as often, because you're not going to find me outside weeding once it gets really hot. I do try to keep the garden well-weeded through at least the end of June. After that, when we mow weekly, I dump more grass clipping mulch on top of the existing mulch and that's about it. If we get a rare, cool and maybe misty or drizzly day in the middle of the summer, I'm out in the garden in a heartbeat weeding.

We had a great garden year in 2012 and I had tons of tomato plants. Know what that meant? It meant I could spend up to 8 to 10 hours a day in June and July mostly just harvesting. I blame the Principe' Borghese tomatoes for that harvesting fiasco. I had a lot of them that year (for sun-dried tomatoes) and could spend a whole day just harvesting those 12 plants because each one would have hundreds of bite-sized tomatoes ripe and ready to pick and dry. I've stopped growing it now because that was just too much time spent harvesting small tomatoes and also have cut back on how many cherry tomato plants I grow for exactly the same reason. If I ever grow Principe Borghese again, I'll just pull up the plants by their roots when they are heavily loaded with ripe tomatoes and hang them in the garage to dry. (This can work well in a dry climate in a dry summer, but in a more humid year, the tomatoes may rot before they dry.) I had my fill that summer of slaving away in the garden, harvesting all day in 90-100+ degree weather.

I'm trying to garden smarter, not harder, these days because I'm not getting any younger and spending all day every day out in the summer heat no longer is an option for me. Evern since the summer of 2011, when I got a mild case of heat exhaustion at least 3 separate times when we were out on fires in 112-116 degree heat, I just cannot tolerate the heat like I once could, and I have to be really careful in the summer because of that. Planting tomatoes as early as possible helps because I'd rather be harvesting and canning the main tomato crop in May and June than in June and July. There's plenty to harvest as it is in the summer months, so getting most of the tomatoes done early means fewer hours out in the hot sun. I also bought a beach-type sun umbrella a few years ago and will carry it out to the garden and stick it in the soil and work in its shade. This works better if I am doing something that keeps me in a relatively small area for a while rather than moving around every 5 minutes. If y'all have too much summer wind, this might not work for you if the wind keeps blowing the umbrella away.

Dawn

If I had an umbrella today it would be in Childress by now

I got a makeshift tunnel for 134 tomato plants with 4 layers of cloth. I could not take having all that in the camper another day !

I hope they are tough. Since I have not been using heat or ac they are used to the wild temp changes.

I'm not surprised to hear that. You probably are a lot more exposed to wind there than I am here.

I imagine the plants will be fine in their tunnel but remember that plants under fabric can overheat if it gets really hot while you're at work. That's what makes springtime so challenging. You have a good amount of airspace between the plants and the fabric so I imagine the plants will be fine, but all bets are off if your forecast high is going to be in the 80s or 90s. I don't leave plants under fabric at temperatures like that. While our nights have been dropping a bit colder than forecast almost every night, our daytime highs also have been running higher than forecast. Earlier this week we had a forecast high of 84 and went to 87 or 88 (depending on which thermometer you trust). This sort of weather could drive a person crazy if they let it. As far as the wind, you must be getting our wind. For the third year in a row, our March seems relatively calm as far as the wind goes. It seems like often, when March winds are not as strong as usual, we get stronger winds in April as if to make up for it.

It has been so warm so early that I haven't had to use row cover much at all this spring, but on Saturday night I'll be covering up all the warm-season plants that are in the ground. Our forecast is for 36 degrees, and we're still a couple of days out so the forecast could change in either direction, but I won't be taking any chances with the few warm-season plants that I do have in the ground. If that 36 degrees wasn't in the forecast, I probably would have put more warm-season plants in the ground already this week, but so far I've resisted the urge to plant more. After Saturday night, if the forecast for next week looks good, I might put 4 more tomato plants in the ground. The main crop, though, will keep growing on in their flats for another couple of weeks. The more I put in the ground early, the more I have to cover up, so I'm trying to be patient and let them enjoy the sunny days without unnecessarily exposing them to very cold nights (which are few and far between). My pecan tree west of the garden shows no real sign of flowering or leafing out yet, and it is a good indicator plant because it rarely gets fooled by the weather. Our soil temperatures have been warm enough for corn for some time, but I probably won't plant it until next week, and after that, bean-planting season lurks in the wings. Mid-March to late-March is a frustrating time when the high temperatures and soil temperatures often are fine for planting warm-season crops but the risk of cold nights has not yet passed. I've been trying to keep myself occupied with weeding and other routine maintenance, and with starting warm-season flowers in flats.

As expected we have a good chance for a freeze Saturday and Sunday morning. Only thing I have out are onions and of course the fruit trees.

We have freezing Temps coming too.

I left the east side of the tunnel open yesterday and a Crack of the west side to get a breeze through there and seemed to keep cool enough. I will take a thermometer out today and see.