Man! I can’t win this year. Two days of below freezing have completely obliterated my poor little tomatoe plants.
You can see the row of 3 tomatoes in the first picture. Yeah…that’s them…the brown lumps of goo. Just two days ago they were busting out of their store pots begging to be let loose. You can see, if you squint, the forth tomatoe behind my king kong, take a beating, show me some more SNOW, I dare you..oregano. It over wintered with the garlic just fine and is going gang busters frost or no. You can see the lettuce is popping up too. I had a simple layer of straw over them for the last two days of frost.
I also noticed that I forgot to try and protect my two squash plants over on the other side of the house *sigh*. They have some tip burn it looks like but I think they may have survived. I’m not too concerned with stunted growth as they are in a tight area anyway.
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Forecast looks good for above freezing temperatures, though still cool. But something else to watch for. It’s severe weather time (eg: tornados) and the College of DuPage folks are out storm chasing this week and Paul Sirvatka has posted that we are heading into a period of potential severe weather for Illinois.
If you don’t have a NOAA weather radio you really should. A couple of my weather nerd friends swear by the Midland WR-300 ($50) or WR-100 ($30). Your local Radio Shack should carry the WR-100 if you don’t want to order via the web. That reminds me. I need to get one!
See! You can not plant until Mother’s day at the earliest. And even then, I’ve seen it snow!
All of my plants are ready and waiting to go on my sun porch. It’s not heated, so I don’t really worry too much about tempering the plants to the cold. Now I have nine new babies all sitting pretty in a row. They will be joined by others after this weekends Oak Park Conservitory sale.
Plus, did I tell you that we’re remodeling the kitchen and the debris from that is all over my back yard?
Just try to think happy plant thoughts for another week at least.
I had never heard the mother’s day thing. That is probably a safe methodology. I think my generic rule going forward is going to be nothing outside that is a warm weather crop (tomatoes, etc) until May 1. The cool weather stuff (cabbage, etc) are doing just fine.
Sorry about your poor little tomatos. I was also living dangerously, by planting a Dahlia in a large planter b4 the middle of May. When we got the freeze warning, I dug it out & brought it in for the night. I also covered some of my tree peony buds with bubblewrap. Everything was fine the next day, & with no freeze in the forecast, so I put the Dahlia back in the planter. At 9 p.m. I noticed that the temperature was down to 34 degrees – but there was still no freeze warning. I left the Dahlia outside, but stuffed the bubblewrap on that instead. Result – some damaged peony buds. The Dahlia’s fine. You should invest in bubblewrap if you want to live dangerously & plant early.
I’m tempting fate! My flowers, zuccs, cukes, and beans are in the ground. Fingers dirty and crossed!