Hi Lee,

Thanks for the heads up. I've been watching this weather so closely and not liking it.

My instincts this year have been to wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, instead of plant, plant, plant, plant, plant. This is so different from how I am most years. So, I'm good. Not rushing anything at all into the ground. I haven't even ordered my onions yet, and usually I'd be planting them sometime between Feb 10th and 20th, depending on the weather. Our ground is super-saturated with all the rain that has fallen since early autumn, so we need for it to dry out some before planting even begins.

I hope we don't get a repeat of last April's late cold too. It was terrible, but I did learn a lesson from it. When cool-season plants in the garden were damaged at temperatures that shouldn't have caused such damage, I put a Min-Max thermometer in the garden and quickly found that the sloping garden was dropping about 3 degrees colder at night than the temperatures we were seeing on the Min-Max thermometer closer to the house and on more level ground. So, now I know that my garden goes slightly colder than I thought it did.

I have a garden shed full of frost blanket material so I can plant whenever I choose provided I am willing to spend a lot of time covering and uncovering plants. Well, I'm not so inclined to spend all that time out there every morning and evening doing all that covering/uncovering when we have a very cold night, so I'm not planting anything yet. I'm trying to wait until the weather settles down. I don't know if my patience will last as long as the cold temperatures, but I'm really doing well with being patient so far.

Dawn