Dumb luck is the best kind, Johnny, and I think you should just go ahead and tell everyone that you planned it this way. (grin) My feeling about the way things work out in the end is that they always work out the way they were meant to be. Clearly your raised rows were always meant to resemble an upside down W (so that would be an M?) and now they are.

I love it when things in my garden work out the way they are supposed to work out, even when it wasn't the way I thought it would work out originally. I learn from things like that.

I love it when a plan comes together, but it doesn't always happen. LOL I planted two raised beds of onions as my main onion crop. They were planted with proper spacing and great care. I took the large onions and those that didn't look so good and planted them in the ground with close spacing and planned to pull them as green onions. Well, wouldn't you know, the ones in the ground have done much better than the ones in the new beds.

I don't have any warm season crops in the ground, but had to cover my onions yesterday since we had a threat of hail. We didn't get hail, but I pulled greenhouse plastic over the hoops that were already in the ground just in case. We have a forecast for four night in the 30's this week, so I will not be planting anything sensitive to cold for quite awhile yet. I'm ready for Spring.

Carol, I think what I am about to say will make me sound garden-obsessed, but I can't help it. I hate having to worry about hail. Two weeks ago, we had a fairly good chance of T-storms and hail. Well, some folks in OK got hail that day but we didn't.

However, since I already had hoops (waiting for frost blankets if needed) over each planted bed, I used zip ties and bird/deer netting to turn each raised bed (except the potato beds since the taters had not broken through the soil yet) into a hail-free zone, unless we got hail large enough to break through the netting. I have done this sporadically (usually with onions) over the years as a short-term measure when hail threatens. It is so nice to know the netting-covered rows are protected from hail that I am going to leave those beds covered. It is driving the cats crazy. The cats love to sleep in the onion beds, crushing onions when they do so. Now they can't sleep in any of the beds that are planted. (They aren't too bad about using the beds as litter boxes because I have trained them to not do that by yelling at them, throwing things at them and spraying them with a spritz of water from a squirt bottle. Sleeping? In planted beds on top of plants? They view that as their right.)

It is easy to lift the hoops up on one side so I can weed, which is what I did yesterday, during which time our newest cat thought, incorrectly, he'd walk into the onion bed and lie down and roll on the onions. He was quickly removed.

The netting does press in against the foliage of the excessively large onions that I planted 1" apart along the edge of the bed so we could use them for green onions. That is okay, since they won't be there for long. Oh, and guess which of my onions have the most leaves and the largest leaves and show no inkling that they will bolt this year? The big ones I planted 1" apart. In this oddest of warm winters, I likely could have planted them with all the other onions and they wouldn't have bolted, but it is too late now. On the other hand, since the order was overpacked, if I had planted the big ones 1" apart for scallions, I would have had to use another onion bed to fit everything in at standard spacing.

The potatoes are emerging from the ground and its' 2" of mulch now but I haven't put netting over them yet and I may not. It would be a pain in the neck to have to lift the hoops and netting every time I needed to hand-pick CPBs. We didn't have any CPBs that I can remember last year, so we'll probably make up for it by having tons of them this year.

Dawn

Johnny, it is great when you just fall into the right thing. Ha ha

Dawn,

I have had Kennebecs freeze to the ground five times (in one season) and still make a crop.

Johnny