I covered roses, irises, clematis, a peony, about 30 lilies and other perennials and have a space heaters going in my otherwise unheated greenhouse. This is not fun. At least there is a good covering of snow, but it is supposed to get so cold now I am worried about trees getting their leaves zapped. I planted about 40 new trees at work last year and they started to leaf out.

Did not cover clematis, iris, pansies, lettuce, rosemary, thyme or calif poppies. I guess that we will see how that works out.

Tomatoes not yet out of the WOW, can jsut close up the WOW (6)

Tomatoes growing out the top of the WOW, experimenting with adding HD bucket over the WOW (10). The small plastic cloches are on pepper plants

1 year old grape vine

Mature grape vine

New leaf-out on grape vines supposedly is damaged at 27 degrees.

Looking good everyone!

The view out the dining room window this morning:

However, one hour later the sun is out and we’ve got serious melting going on!

Thursday evening:

Saturday morning:

We got about 12". I covered as many things as I had buckets for, for snow weight as much as cold. I didn't try to do anything to the 4' tall peony that was about to bloom...

Looking out the windows this morning we see one broken branch on a big maple and another on our 40 year old apple tree, which isn't too bad.

I did pick some popsicle flowers in the sleet early Friday and they're making it very cheerful inside :)

Good luck everyone! Hope we still get some flowers out of the spring perennials!

LClark, wow, you planted 40 trees last year at work?

Jerry, I'm very encouraged by your success with your clematis during the April freeze and hoping mine will be okay uncovered. I just didn't know how to cover them when they're twining up their trellises.

Smooshed is the word of the day here. Within a week or so most of the plants will be looking back to normal though some pruning will be necessary. Our least favorite tree, a Russian Olive, lost ~80% of it's branches. We cut off all the smaller stuff today but will have to wait for the chainsaw tomorrow to get the big stuff. The two smaller trees close to it will be happy for the additional sunlight. The Russian Olive will probably survive but we might decide to just be done with it.

It looks like the Cheyenne Ridge spared us a walloping here in Fort Collins. I spent quite a bit of time wrapping and covering....and we only got down to 34 degrees with slushy rain.

That being said, tonight's supposed to be hovering just below freezing so I ain't gonna take any any of it off just yet!

Mummified back bed.

The old laundry basket + sheet + brick standby.

Styrofoam coolers have so many uses!

A peek at the irises; they bloomed just the day before. The grape scent is heavenly under there.

An assortment of bean plants and seedlings, looking like kids stuck inside during recess.

Best wishes for everyone's plant recovery. I've been there, done that. Hang in there.

--L

I like the laundry basket idea! That's one I had not considered. I saw someone mention using a card table with a sheet over it. I thought that was pretty good idea for larger plants. I covered as much as I could and I'm leaving it all covered until Sunday.

Well it got to 21. pretty bad damage to some new leaves on trees. northern red oak, norway maple, ohio buckeye look complely fried. Much worse than expected. hope they can regrow leaves and not die. apple and pear blossoms fried, but leaves ok. Raspberries look sad, didn’t cover them, hope they pull through.

greenhouse stuff looks good. put space heaters in there.

yeah, i work at an apartment complex. also own a couple buildings myself. The owner/developer planted a monoculture of cottonwoods and they got too big so about 60 came down. I planted in their place honey locust, ohio buckeye, accolade elm and spring snow crab. the buckeyes got damaged but the others are ok,

I kind of hate looking at it but we got some significant and minor cane breakage for our roses. Bummed!

We had 35 mph winds Thursday ahead of the storm. I got the tomato, pepper and eggplant flats in before the wind kicked up. The peonies and iris are too tall to cover with pots, so I tried to get some stakes in around them. The ground was too hard and dry to get the stakes in more than a few inches. They wouldn't have supported a cover, so I decided to scrap that idea. The peonies and iris stalks bent, but didn't break. The moisture was wonderful and so needed! Hopefully, we are well and truly done with the freezing temps for this growing season. Now, if we could turn down the wind a bit, that'd be great!

Mixed bag here. The tomatoes with buckets on the WOWs did great -even seemed to grow during this mess. Memo to file.

The closed up WOWs not as great - looking a bit smashed. May need more buckets next tiem.

Peppers in the cheapo plastic cloches look fine. I hope that they don't end up stunted.

Unprotected stuff looks a bit battered, but fine. Calif poppies, lupines, lettuce,pansies, chard, rosmary, thyme, clematis,hosta. The iris look like nothing happened.

Covering the big grape vine was probably a mistake. We never got down to critical temps. Meanwhle, the cover blowing around and the weight of the heavy snow broke off many shoots and left the whole vine looking bad. Probably lost over half of the crop, but looks like I will still get grapes.

Also, I planted pre-sprouted Fortex pole bean seeds 5/13 which began to emerge in the usual 6 days on Thursday 5/19. To protect them, I covered the rows with about 2" of fine mulch. Looks to have worked. Also planted the rest of my pre-sprouted pole bean seeds Wed 5/18 figuring that they would not emerge until after the storm. These all may fail but the cost of re-seeding beans is small.

Colorado has such changeable weather. I suspect that it isn't all that usual but it doesn't seem so uncommon. It must be difficult for gardeners and a real need for the Weather Service.

The story here is that it will be the latest 70° in about 130 years of record-keeping altho the nearest airport to my garden recorded a 70° afternoon on the 15th. Usually cloudy by afternoon and so the day just doesn't warm much. At least 2 recent frosts but we aren't having record low temperatures - just little warmth.

If this continues, it will be a most remarkable contrast to 2021 when we had 111° on a June day!

It will be the latest that I have set out tomato plants since I lived at a 500 feet higher elevation. Decades Ago! I am just beginning to harden them off. The things took forever to grow with such limited light coming into the greenhouse. Peppers are even in worse shape and I'll baby them longer by keeping them in the protection of the greenhouse.

Steve

111 degrees?? Oooof! Was that part of that weird Pacific Northwest heat wave that made the news?

(***eyes digit's greenhouse with intense, unmitigated envy*** )

--L

• The
• Heat
• "Dome"