For z 7 April 10 will probably work. Of course you might have to cover to protect from a late frost.

Sammy,

I believe the OSU-recommended dates are April 10-30, with the April 10th being for more southern parts of the state, April 30th for more northern parts, and people in the middle planting somewhere between the two dates.

My average last frost date is March 27th, but I plant tomatoes later and late every year because covering up 140 plants on the occasional freezing or frosty night is just too much work. I also stagger my planting....transplanting out maybe 10 to 20 per day until they're all planted. If something is going to find its way into the garden and eat my tomato plants, I'd rather that occur when the first 10 or 20 are in the ground, and not when all of them are planted. Plus, by staggering the planting dates, I only have to cover up a few on cold nights in the beginning and (hopefully) by the time I get a lot more plants into the ground, the cold nights have passed.

Since we have had frost at our house during the first week of May the last three years, I am not in a hurry to get the tomatoes into the ground. I don't wait until May to plant them, but I don't rush to plant them in early spring either.

In general, folks in my county plant out in the first half of April if they are on high ground, and beginning around April 10-15 if they are at a low-lying elevation like I am.

You can plant them whenever you want if you're able to cover them up and prevent freeze damage or frost from killing them. I just think having to cover them up every other night or so isn't worth the couple of weeks of extra growing time I get from planting early.

Remember to plant by soil/air temps and not by the calendar. Tomato plants grow well when the soil and air temps are in the range they like and not by the calendar. If planted too early into cold soil, they just sit there and stall until the soil warms up anyway.

Dawn

I hope at some point between now and planting time that mine will dry out enough to till. I have planted 2 raised beds, about 3/4 of the south side of my garden, and some containers, but the north end is far too wet to till and we had .85 inch of rain last night. This seems to happen every spring.

Boy, could we use some of your rain, Carol!

Dawn, in doing your staggered plantings, do you also stagger the varieties, or do you try to plant all of a certain type at the same time? Or, does it not make any difference? I wondered if you planted your later producing kinds first.

Susan

I like to purchase them early, then plant when I think they will be ok. Since I plant in containers, I keep the original containers, and am prepared to jerk them up if necessary. It hasn't been the last two years -- that is all the history I have.

Southwood has a listing of the tomatoes they sell, and a brief description. I am so glad they did that. I like to purchase with prior information. Since I am so new,I can be influenced by casual remarks of others.

We have a freezer, and that ends the canning ideas I had. Now I need to concentrate on what can freeze well as opposed to what can can well. (can can)

Today is starting out cold, but not rainy so must go.

Thanks for the information. If you have ideas on what will freeze well, let me know.

Sammy

Carol,

You know, we can't fight our weather.

All winter I was deliriously happy that our Fractional Water Index was staying at 1.0. I thought that for once I'd have good soil moisture that lasted. However, between the high temps on many days, the low humidity and the strong winds, our FWI at 2" has dropped from 1.0 to 0.4 in about 2 weeks' time. So, I'm back to being dry and needing to water a lot. You're stuck with the "same old same old" wet soil at planting time that you always have. So, we're both in the same old boat we're usually in.

Since I already have my onions and potatoes planted and they're all in raised beds, it could rain 8" in one day and I wouldn't care. Instead, we are drying out really fast. With high temps in the 80s coming later this week accompanied by very strong winds and moderate humidity (at my end of the state but very low RH in much of central thru western OK at the same time), I expect we'll drop to 0.3 by the weekend.

It appears you and I will always have the opposite problems in spring....your ground too wet and my ground too dry no matter what the weather does in the winter months. I'd rather have ground that's too dry at planting time though because I can add water while you really can't pull the excess moisture out of your ground.

We had 0.40 inches overnight Sunday going into Monday but you can barely tell it fell at all. If you get tired of all that rain, send it to us down here. : )

Susan, I think it is more or less random when I transplant out. Keep in mind I already have 7 or 8 plants in containers that have set fruit as of Sunday so I don't feel pressured to hurry up and plant so I can have early tomatoes. I already know I'll have early tomatoes.

Usually, I just pick out the largest, healthiest transplants and put them in the ground first. Then, on the second day, I pick out the largest healthiest transplants among the remaining plants and transplant them out, etc. For every plant that goes in the ground, I have a clearly labeled back-up flat that has one back-up of the same variety for each plant in the ground. And, no matter how many big healthy transplants I have of any one given variety, I have a pre-determined number I'm going to put in the ground and don't exceed it. For example, if I am going to put 3 Cluster Goliath plants in the ground and I have 8 of them and they're the largest, healthiest and most vigorously growing of all the plants, I'll still just put 3 of them in the ground. Then, I'll put 3 in my back up flat. I can use those as replacements if a freeze or wildfire wipes out my garden. Then, the two remaining plants are put in a giveaway flat. I give some of those away to local friends and neighbors and to people Tim works with, and the rest come to the Spring Fling with me. I label all my flats with duct tape so I don't get confused and give away plants from the back-up flats. With several hundred tomato plants, it is easy to get confused!

Tomato growth is so heavily dependent on soil temps and air temps that often the last plants I put into the ground catch up quickly with those planted earlier, and by the end of May, you cannot tell by looking at the plants that some of them went into the ground 2 to 4 weeks earlier than the others. The plants that go in early have to deal with colder nights than the ones in flats in the garage or on the sunporch, so they grow more slowly once transplanted. I always hate to take plants off the sunporch and put them into the garden because the real-life temps out in the garden slow down their growth significantly.(The sunporch gets delightfully warm on sunny days.)

Sammy, Almost everything you're growing freezes well. I freeze beans, broccoli, some cabbage (as freezer slaw), carrots, corn, okra, some onions (chopped and sliced so they're ready to use in cooking), eddible-podded peas, peppers of all kinds (some frozen whole, others sliced or chopped, some frozen raw and others roasted first), southern peas, spinach (when I grow it) summer squash, and tomatoes. In a good melon year, I make melon balls from watermelon, muskmelon, canteloupe, honeydew and other melons, and freeze them. However, when you thaw them, there is a noticeable change in texture. We tend to eat them half-thawed because we like them better that way than fully thawed.

I usually preserve the following by canning: cucumbers (as pickles and as pickle relish), peppers, tomatoes and some fruits.

I usually preserve the following by curing them well and storing them in the root cellar (our tornado shelter): onions, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash and sometimes the long-keeping type tomatoes.

I usually preserve the following fresh but well-chilled long-term in the extra refrigerator out in the garage: cabbage, carrots, and some lettuce. Tim eats so much lettuce, I don't have much trouble storing whatever has been harvested recently.

Some items are stored multiple ways. For example, spring-harvested cabbage will last quite a long time in the extra refrigerator, but I also make sauerkraut out of some of it and can that, and then I make freezer slaw out of some of it and freeze it. Fall-harvested cabbage stores a long time in the root cellar.

Tomatoes are frozen, canned, dehydrated and eaten in great quantitie while fresh. Some are given away.

Most of the fruit we raise can be frozen, canned or dehydrated as well as eaten fresh.

There are a few things that are best eaten fresh like radishes (although they'll last quite a while in the fridge), lettuce and other greens, swiss chard (I bet you can freeze it but I don't), beets, turnips and rutabagas.

I usually preserve the following by dehydrating: bite-sized tomatoes, many herbs, and sometimes summer squash, carrots and melons. The summer squash and carrots can be rehydrated and cooked or just thrown into soups where they'll rehydrate as they cook. Dehydrated melon can be eaten the same way you eat any dehydrated fruit. It is very, very sweet.

The Ball Blue Book has an entire section on freezing that tells you the best process to use when freezing foods.

Dawn

For the last two years I've lost plants to late frost (just one of the MANY rookie mistakes I've made)!

This year, I plan to watch the ten day forecast CLOSELY around April 15th. If it looks good, they'll go out then.

If anything under 37 or so is predicted, I plan to wait.

Jo

Jo,

Losing plants to a late frost is not a rookie mistake. It can and does happen to anyone.

We have such wide variation in our temperatures here that it is impossible to plant in springtime with any certainty that you won't have a late freeze or frost swoop in and kill your plants a month after you plant them. It's happened to me a lot.

With an "average last freeze" date of March 28, you wouldn't think I'd have to worry about a freeze or a frost in May, but it has happened here at our house the last three years. Conversely, we had a run of really "hot" winters at our end of the state in the early 2000s and for several years I put tomato plants in the ground the first week in March and didn't lose them to cold weather. So, which weather do you trust? My answer is I don't trust any of it!

In general, though, I feel pretty safe putting tomato plants in the ground two weeks after my "average last" date, but I still have a heap of buckets and blankets so I can cover up the plants if Mr. Freeze or Ms. Frosty pops back into the forecast.

Having had a late frost the first week of May for the past 3 years, I never really feel like my plants are "safe" until about May 10th.

And, while it isn't a rookie mistake, one thing a lot of garden rookies do not understand is that frost damage doesn't just occur at freezing temperatures. Under some conditions (and they aren't rare conditions either), frost forms between 33 and 38 degrees. I've heard it can happen even at 39 degrees but haven't personally witnessed it in my garden. I've had lots of frost at temps between 33 and 38 and if the temperature is below about 35 or 36, it usually remains on the plants long enough to damage or kill them. It took me a while to realize how common this was and to cover up my plants on cold but above-freezing nights when frost was likely.

I guess if it weren't for all the weather's twists and turns here (pun intended), gardening would be so easy a caveman could do it......

Dawn

The past two years I planted in the ground in may, would have to check my notes to be sure, but it has worked so well I will try late planting again. I live in a hole and get frost when no one else does.

Larry

Dawn - reading your post re: backup flats made my head spin. I thought I was organized, but you run circles around me! But, you've given me some great ideas!
Carolj

Carol,

I didn't have many if any backup plants the first few years we were here, roughly from 1999 through about 2004 because we were having really warm winters and spring came early and stayed. Since then, winters have been colder at least at our house, and erratic cold nights with near-freezing and below-freezing temperatures have held on into the first week of May. So, the backup flats developed from having cold temps wipe out too many of my plants.

I don't think I'm as organized as I sound. I try to be organized. I label the flats, starting out with Flat #1, Flat #2, etc. at the time I pot up seedlings from the starter flat. Then, at planting time I start a back-up flat labeled "Back-Up" and put the extras in a flat called "Extra". As I plant, the plants of each variety go into the ground, into the back-up flat or into the flat of "extras". So far, so good.

Then, real life happens.....someone drops a flat or a dog runs through a flat sitting on the patio in the sun or cats pick up a plant in their mouth and drag it out of the tray, or a young, visiting child rearranges plants....so even though I try to get organized and stay organized, real life often undoes my efforts.

I have found being organized does help, but y'all shouldn't take that to mean that I'm really organized. I always start out pretty organized but have trouble staying organized. This year, knock on wood, so far I am a bit more organized than usual, and I don't know why. I guess we just haven't had our first garden disaster yet this year, but we will.

Dawn

After much trial and error I've concluded that putting tomatoes seedlings out before April 10th is a gamble. Things always seem nice then waam!......
Since I usually try to time plantings according to the weekends, I've found that planting tomatoes the weekend after April 10th and eggplant and peppers on the LAST weekend of April produces the quickest, healthiest results. I'm in the Western Heights area where it is hot, dry, and windy. When switching to this formula, I've had great success with minimal running out in the middle of the night to cover stuff up.

As a side note, we have several relatives who's birthdays are between April 10th- and April 30th, so sometimes it's fun to "plant tomatoes on so-and-so's birthday this year"

Dale, OKC