I covered all my plants that are still hanging out in their pots. No, that is not quite true, I covered all the ones my blanket would reach. The almost dead torenias are on their own (but up against the foundation.)

I cut a bouquet of irises.

I am plant sitting for friends of mine...all those pots are snug in my house.

Everything else is on it's own.

PLEASE let this be the last time!!! :)

Lisa

My poor tomatoes. I put a pot on 9 of them that were not too large, then covered it with a beach towel. I just plunked a beach towel on the 5 taller ones. I have no idea what is going to happen to them.

Earlier, I probably lost my orange celosias, but the purple were fine. Now they may all be gone. My rose bushes should be fine, but most of them are at least 4-5 feet, and I cannot do anything with them --- 150.

This is a heck of a time to start over on tomatoes. I bet the local nurseries love this weather.

Sammy

strawberries and blueberries with sheets, tomatoes with 5 gallon buckets, because they are BIG and 8-10" potatoes with lots and lots of shredded leaves. 2-3" corn with leaves too. And at 10pm it is 34 at our house. The garden is downhill and in the open so I am afraid it may already be colder there. Sigh.....

I covered my potatoes with hay. They have been bit 3 times this year and already have potato bugs on them. The onions and cole crops are doing well for the most part. I just have to have a better setup before next year. I have row cover, but I dont have a good way to keep it clean and white. It is so pretty I hate for i to get dingy. I also have had trouble with the bugs getting in it.

Larry.

My house is full of tomatoes. They don't fit under the lights. They will just have to wait until Sat. or Sun. for sun. I am not putting them in and out. I have the lights on in the basement. Annuals that I haven't been able to plant are under lights and some tomatoes are laying on their sides under lights the ones that would fit. I have some tomatoes outside in wall of water covers. I put old clothes over those. I covered some shrubs with flower buds but not the blueberries. Mine are probably 6 feet tall and the row cover blew off twice so I put it over an azalea with big flower buds ready to open soon . The few potatoes I have are covered and most lettuce. I covered some violas even though they can take frost. They are so pretty I don't want them knocked back.

i hav'nt covered anything. So far my potatoes are the only thing i'd hate to get bit.

I'm still holding out from warm season crops. I do have corn and green beans up but i can still replant if needed. they are not very tall yet.

start back to work the 13th as a gun loader for oilfield wireline company.

I covered everything with row cover and when I ran out of row cover I used the pile of old blankets, bedspreads and sheets I keep piled up on a shelf for just such special occasions.

Larry, go ahead and get that row cover dirty. We bought a new roll of 10-degree row cover three or four weeks ago and every bit of it is dirty and muddy but we haven't lost a single plant. I use everything under the sun to hold down the row cover. I use the U-shaped landscape pins made to hold down the row cover and when I run out of them, I use metal T-posts, boards, bricks, large rocks, pieces of rebar, every shovel and other garden tool we have, cat litter jugs filled with water, etc. Pretty much anything heavy enough to hold down the row cover gets used.

We had trouble covering some of the potato plants because they're about 3' tall and we ran out of row cover, so I took some of the folding tables out of the greenhouse and put them over the potato plants. Then I draped blankets and bedspreads over the tables and held them down at the ground level with metal t-posts. I hope this is the last time I have to cover potatoes and tomatoes because they are getting too tall to easily cover.

Since we don't heat the greenhouse (this ridiculous spring weather has me thinking I might heat it next year), we have plants all over the house...I brought in 13 flats last night and a couple dozen plants in containers of various sizes. At this point the inside of the house looks like a greenhouse or nursery.

I haven't even planted beans yet but the corn is up about 6-8" do I covered it. It needs to be thinned but I've been putting that off, thinking that Mother Nature might thin it for me.

I couldn't cover up the sugar snap peas growing on the garden fence so the cold temperatures might knock their blossoms off. I harvested about 3 lbs of sugar snap peas ahead of the cold spell but there was a lot more smaller ones in various stages and sizes. So far it is a great cool-season crop year but we've barely put any warm-season stuff in the ground yet. I intend to change that this weekend.

If another cold front hits next week, I'll have to let some of the cool-season crops stay uncovered so that I can cover the warm-season ones. I just hate the thought of cool-season plants being damaged when they are beginning to produce. The frost or freezing temperatures we are having with these cold fronts won't kill them but could really set them back.

I hope we don't get too hot too soon. The temperatures we had last week on the upper 80s and lower 90s already have caused some of this spring's lettuce to start bolting. We have it growing in 5 places and it is bolting in 2 of those locations.

Busy1, You're ahead of me on beans! I hope you aren't going to have to work those horribly long hours like you did last year.

Dawn

I didn't do a whole garden examination this morning, but the front gardens looked fine. A little bit of frost here and there. Irises looked beautiful as did the roses.

On a side note....a young woman today asked me what the flowers were in my car. She had never seen an iris before. Wow. They are all over the place. She must have grown up in apartments.

I decided that I had wasted space in between my cattle panels until the summer crops grew large enough to need the space so I grew 16 foot rows of potatoes down the center. Luckily we left just over 4 feet between the panels so I was able to put my hoops between them and cover with row cover. The north panel had Sugar Snaps on it that were about 6-8 inches tall but not yet clinging to the panel so I kind of pushed one side of them under the cover, and covered the either side with some narrower row cover just placed on top of them. The wind was blowing so hard against the one on the north side, that I pinned tarp over a cattle panel to keep the wind from hitting the row cover so hard. The second had beans planted but they were not up, so I didn't have to worry about crushing anything there. The third one will be my cucumber trellis and hasn't been planted but has 2 rows of potatoes on the other side of it.

I'm thinking that I may just leave this side covered for another week. On the other end of the garden I have one more bed covered with row cover, but some covered with sheets. I've already removed the tarp on that end, and will be removing sheets in the morning.

My peas will probably all be resting on the ground, but I always have to tie them up when they are about a foot tall anyway. I secure them about a foot from the ground, then beginn to push them through the panels to the opposite side from where they are growing until they begin to cling to each other. I usually secure them again about every foot, because if one falls, they all fall and it's a mess.

I left my tomatoes under cover tonight, but I peeked at one of them today and it looked great. It was covered with a transparent blue tinted 5 gallon water jug with a sheet tossed over the top. I think it has adjusted to it's environment just fine, but now I have to harden off some more. They have not been in a heated area, but it is well insulated and stays pretty comfortable. I thought I was starting them way to late, but as it turns out, they are just about the perfect size for transplanting. Just FYI, the ones in the ground are larger than the others although they only had a couple of warm days after they were planted before this cold weather arrived.

Here is a link that might be useful: Half of my garden.

Well, RATS! I uncovered my tators when I got home from work yesterday. Wondered if I had damage from it being to hot under those rubbermaid containers....

Now, we have frost on the neighbors car windows, and the taters might have damage after all... from the cold.

Just why did I decided to plant my first ever tater crop???

Moni

Nooooo don't tell me that. My plants are all uncovered too.

Nooooo don't tell me that. My plants are all uncovered too.

I left everything covered and am glad I did. We went colder than forecast (33 actual vs. forecast of 39 at our house, and 29 degrees recorded at our mesonet station) and we have heavy, heavy frost.

I was going to uncover today, but think I won't. Or, I might pull back the covers and lay them in the pathways and let the plants have more sun and then pull the row covers back over them tonight. The thinner row cover lets plenty of sunlight through, but the stuff that gives 10 degrees of protection allows a lot less light transmission. I am even worried about Sunday night's forecast which has been lowered to 44. A forecast of 44 at our house likely means 38 degrees and frost.

I hope all the plants that were uncovered north of us made it, but from looking at the mesonet map it would seem most of y'all were quite a bit warmer up there than we are down here.

Moni, The taters will be fine. They bounce back really fast from frost damage, but a little slower from freeze damage. I don't worry about 1 episode of damage. It is when there are multiple episodes that your harvest can be impacted since the plants have to repeatedly put energy into recovering from frost or freeze damage, leaving them less energy to put into producing potatoes.

Dawn

But, Lisa, my outdoor thermometer said 44.

To make matter worse... it was 50, when I left this morning in my car, drove to Mitch Park in Edmond.. and it had gone down to 47. Did a very cold ride, 40 miles, with the temps in the 40's when the sun went away again.

I am not liking Mother Nature this year!

Moni