I kind of feel that way too especially with this weeks forecast. However I have lived here long enought to know better. I mean I wouldnt chance it with the most tender stuff.

My weather is like NE Ok and mksmth's. So some things, like the early and 'coldset' type tomatoes in my coldfames, would be a risk. (they aren't actually going out in the garden, yet, but will, much earlier than my LFD.)

It would be a risk, Except, I am planting seeds of the same varieties inside Wall o Waters this week, out in the garden, and I have more baby plants inside, growing at a more conservative schedule. Every year, reading about Dawn and Co.'s early measures, I get more bold with weather, and go lighter on dates. I lose some, but gain more than I lose, all total. So it isn't a risk. It is just planning for a spread of possibles.

I know blackberry winter waits after the warm-up, but I have rowcover and backup plants. It has been years since we have had enough tomatoes to actually eat, not just snack on, and I am tired of temperatures nosing 100 here to stay, and ending my tomato and cucumber season in what I consider early summer!

So plan away. It is certainly fun to read about!

Not gonna chance it. I'll work on the soil and beds, but that's it. I'd suggest everyone stock up on bug spray!

I've been known to sneak things out pretty early and then go throw a sheet/pot over things if it's going to be too cold. I garden in 4 (soon to be 5!) 4x8 ft raised beds so it's feasible to just cover things up occasionally. I love to "break the rules" in the garden! :)

It is too hot in my green house, even fully opened. I'm not putting in a fan, don't want the electrical cord. So a tray full of greens I started last fall got put in the ground today. I had my safe set out date calculated as 3/3 so I am early, but not by much. I plan to put some spinach seeds out there with them (this was chard, tatsoi and yokatta na with one spinach plant. I read to interplant mache with onions, so I saved that out. Have to go get my onions!

Amy. My greenhouse is getting pretty hot too. I do have a fan and that helps a little. Might try some row cover as a shade cloth. My citrus are going out tommorrow afternoon. Nothing really below 40 for the next week or so.

My greenhouse has LOTs of ventilation, so not too hot yet. I did start tomatoes, peppers, broccoli and cabbage in the hot bench today, and soaked Super Sugar Snap peas in the house. And DH tilled part of the garden. Spring garden season has officially started

Oh, yeah, I meant to plant peas today...thanks for reminding me to soak them.

Mksmth, will your citrus be outside? Mine are in the house. The lemon dropped all its leaves and is now starting to get new ones and the lime, which was doing fine and has fruit on it is starting to drop it's leaves. Probably too wet or too dry.

I had to water my parsnips today. They were seeded a month ago and in that time I think we got a trace of rain.

The purple sprouting broccoli is looking like we'll get some soon. Even the "Early Broccoli" I harvested last fall looks like it might do more sprouts now. I brought 4 varieties of Brussels Sprouts through the winter and they show NO sign of producing.

Amy. They will. Plan to put them under a maple tree and get some filtered sun. I'll leave them out until the temps dip below 40

Starting what early?

Oh, planting?

Well, heck yeah, I started early. Not too early, but early nevertheless. How could I not in this weather? Y'all know I've got the row cover to protect everything I plant, so I am spending part of each day planting something in the ground. I am having to work around the fire season, so I try to get out early and accomplish something in case our pagers are going to go off later in the day. I want to plant every day, but Thursday we likely will have critical fire weather conditions, so I'll probably be cooking Thursday morning instead of gardening in order to have food prepared to feed the firefighters Thursday afternoon or evening.

Last week I transplanted some lettuce plants and strawberry plants into very large containers in the veggie garden. I previously had planted one bundle of 1015Y Texas Supersweet Onions into a container to raise for eating as green onions/scallions.

On Sunday I did a lot of garden clean-up work when we weren't at fires.

On Monday I planted 8 bundles of onions and weeded a couple of raised beds and a couple of pathways.

Today I transplanted cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage and half of my collard green plants into the ground, mulched that stuff, and weeded another pathway and a raised bed.

Tomorrow I am going to put up the pea trellis, transplant Super Sugar Snap Pea plants into the ground, transplant spinach seedlings (in plantable peat pellets) into the ground and, hopefully, find time to plant the remaining collard green plants.

Thursday, I'll do firefighter cooking in the morning and then, if we haven't been paged out to fires, I'll go outside and start planting my seed potatoes. If I don't get to plant potatoes on Thursday, I'll try again on Friday. If I don't get to work in the garden on Friday, there's always Saturday. I hope to sow carrot seed and radish seed sometime this week but if I don't get around to it until next week, that's okay to.

I have some odds and ends of herb plants to get into the ground...some dill, sage, parsley and, hmmm, something else.....oh, tomato plants. I have 11 purchased tomato plants that I've potted up into bigger pots and carry outside every morning and inside every evening. These plants serve the purpose of giving me some tomato plants to "play" with when I get the urge to plant early so that I don't jump the gun and plant my own home-grown precious baby tomato plants too early and lose them. I don't care nearly as much if I plant purchased tomato plants too early and they freeze to death because I haven't raised them from seed and have no real emotional attachment to them. I'm not going to put them into the ground this week, unless the devil makes me do it, but I WANT to put them in the ground. I know that I shouldn't and so I won't. Maybe I won't. Well, probaby I won't. Maybe. Oh heck, maybe I will plant them Saturday. You just never know what I'll do when the weather is nice.

Tim and I have officially declared that winter is over at our house, which means nothing, of course, since we have no control over the weather. We're just going to pretend that Spring already is here and we are going to ignore any wintery weather that occurs. We'll pretend the wintery weather isn't real, even if we are sitting inside watching snowflakes fall and land on top of our row covers that are keeping our little plants toasty warm. We're really good at denial if we need to be. Now that Spring is here, we'll just ignore any evidence that shows it has not, in fact, arrived here.

Today there was a mockingbird sitting on the garden fence singing to me while I worked. Now, if that is not a sign of spring, what is?

We always pay for nice February weather with a big cold front later on but I just don't care. I'll cover up the plants when it comes. There's no way I'm wasting this weather. How often do we have highs in the upper 70s in February? This weather is too wonderful to ignore. Because I have not been ignoring it and because I am, apparently, getting older every year, every part of my body is stiff and sore from all the getting up and down, crawling around in the garden, pulling weeds, lifting this here, moving that there, wheeling the wheelbarrow around. Every part of my body hurts...and that is a sure sign of spring too.

Have fun!

Embrace the craziness.

Live it up.

Carpe diem.

Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow it will not freeze, but next week it might!

Tonight I fed my family frozen pizza. Last night we had fast food. Surely they remember that during planting season, I ignore cooking. I don't forget how to do it. I just don't want to do it. Spring planting season is a time of madness and insanity here. Well, the madness and insanity are early this year.

Dawn

I don't think I've ever had as many plants in the ground this early before. It is awesome. How often do we get to plant cool-season crops in warm conditions? (Well, other than when we are planting in late summer for a fall or winter harvest.) Usually I am out shivering in a cold, wet garden while trying to get the cool-season stuff planted on time. I am not a fan of cold weather, so I find planting in cold weather to be tedious. This year, I haven't really had to do any planting on days with cold weather, which is remarkable.

I have almost all my cool-season crops in the ground now, and they look remarkably happy. What's not to like about this week's weather? Now, if we just get the rain that is in the forecast for Sun-Tues or Wed, the garden will be in awesome shape. Yesterday the sulphur butterflies were in the garden with me, and it was hot out there, so it felt more like mid-spring than late winter.

It is taking every bit of will power that I possess to keep me from putting my large, early tomato plants in the ground. Every time I start trying to talk myself into planting them, I look at the nights in our forecast next week with lows in the 30s and remind myself that it is still winter. I will be watching the soil temperatures next week to see how much the cold nights and cooler days bring them back down because our soil is abnormally warm for February and I doubt it will stay quite as warm after the cooler weather returns.

Now that the cool-season crops are in the ground, I can focus on other things while waiting for the weather to stabilize enough to start planting warm-season crops.

I've been pacing myself on cool-season crops as a self defense mechanism. The expected cool down for the next couple of weeks should be adequate to curb my desire to go all in. Hopefully, the rain chances I'm seeing on Tues, will actually produce some moisture.

Our chances for rain down here vary from 20% tonight to 50% (last time I checked) on either Tues or Wed, and that alone will make me slow down and take it easy. I need for the cold to return before the peach tree and I both lose our minds. A couple of days ago, the first daffodils bloomed. Today there's a whole lot more in bloom. Just a couple of weeks ago their foliage was barely emerged. This is the fastest we've warmed up in ages. I wish it would last, but I'm sure it won't.

I cannot focus. I cannot wrap my head around what I need to start. About time I do I think "I need to look that up and see what I need to remember about growing it" hours later I'm scratching my head wondering where my time went. And DH always wants me to do something that's NOT on my radar, and then we argue about it.

Do you soak your seeds and if so, for how long? I am vasillating about direct seeding peas or starting them in tp tubes like last year. I am going to use up some older seed, so it may not germinate as well...

Do you soak turnip seeds?

Soil temp in the pea bed, under Austrian Winter peas is 50.

My peas are all about 4" tall. Same with the other cool season crops. Will wait until this week to stick them outside. All my plants that over-wintered are going crazy. Broccoli has heads on it already.

Sometimes I soak peas, sometimes I don't. They may sprout slightly more quickly if soaked for a couple of hours, or they may not. It seems to me that the room temperature at germination time influences how fast they sprout more than whether they were soaked or not. I didn't soak this year and they sprouted just fine. Mine were 2 or 3" tall when they went into the ground and look very happy and healthy despite having the wind blowing pretty hard this week.

One advantage to sprouting them and then setting them out is that the warmer indoor temperatures make them sprout more quickly. It also lessens the chance they will rot in the cold outdoor soil (especially if it is wet) before they germinate. I don't have any cold wet soil outdoors in which seeds could rot, but at the time I sowed the seeds indoors, I didn't know we were about to have a mid-February heat wave or I wouldn't even have bothered.

I don't soak turnip seeds.

This warm spell has had be discombobulated as well. My brain wants to hurry up and do everything before the weather gets too hot to stay, so it has been hard to stay focused on cool-season stuff. I'm glad we're turning back slightly cooler because cool-season crops don't always do well when it gets too hot too early in their growing season.

I set up my greenhouse (one of those little cheapy things with the plastic bag covering on it) in our bedroom and have been playing with seeds. Today I potted up a bunch of the tomato and basil seedlings and got them ready to move outside. I'm thinking about moving the whole greenhouse out; it doesn't seem to get enough light in our room and some of the seedlings looked a little too spindly. My wintersown containers aren't doing much of anything, but it's early yet. I also need to figure out how to put in a garden that's safe from the monsters--er, I mean precious puppies that have already "helped" me garden a few too many times.

This time of year I feel very far behind when many of you are putting things in the garden and re-potting plants, etc. Then I look at my forecast and get a reality check, like the 32 degrees in my forecast for Wednesday. So here is where I stand in Grove. I have planted seed outdoors for spinach and mustard/spinach. My onions should arrive next week. Potatoes are sprouting in paper bags. I planted my first tray of seed today, mostly tomato and broccoli. It was nice to be able to sit outside today and plant that tray and I have a lot more to do, but 20 Feb is my normal day for starting seed, so I really am not behind.

Jen, If you move that cheapy greenhouse thing outdoors, be sure to leave it unzipped during the day whenever there is sunshine or your plants will roast to death and be beyond saving. Plenty of people have done that and later complained about it here, so just be aware.....the greenhouse effect is real and will kill.

My precious doggies help me in the garden by staying out of it, and away from it. A sturdy garden fence is a wonderful thing and I wouldn't be able to garden without it. Dogs can be just as dangerous to a garden as deer, coons, armadillos, rabbits and possums...and skunks.

Carol, Our weather mid-week will be almost as cold as yours at night---I think we are going down to at least 37. You are not behind. I'm just ahead. Now that my cool-season stuff is planted, how am I going to occupy myself for the next 3 or 4 weeks. Take up tennis? knitting? Who knows. I sent you an email a few minutes ago, filled with breaking news from our county.

Dawn