Freeze warning April 20-21 2021

[theozarkan]

Well darn. Forecast just keeps getting worse. At first they were calling for a low of 34 now they are saying it can dip down into the upper 20's in north Arkansas on Wednesday morning.  I've got a few tomatoes out in containers. I guess I'll try to cover those the best I can. It will be a pain but I'm planning on taking all my starts that are in my tunnel inside. I thought about trying to run a light in there but I just can't risk losing those. 

[macmex]

Yes, here, Tuesday morning the forecast is that temps will go down to 27 F. That's really cold! Anything remotely frost sensitive will come inside at my place.

[chrysanthemum]

We won’t get anything like your cold down here, but we did put a small fire in our woodstove this morning just to chase the chill away. It was strange to go outside to my garden therefore and see the flowers on the tomatoes and buds on the peppers and eggplant. We had extreme heat a week ago, now cold.

[chrysanthemum]

I don’t know how low you are forecast to go, but at any freeze warning I’d be covering if I could.  Didn’t you just get new row covers?  It sounds like it’s time to use them.

I cover when I think things could be in real danger, especially if the crop or life of the plant could be at stake.  I’ve used row covers, cardboard boxes or pots or buckets weighted down with rocks.  Before the really hard (week-long) freeze we had here, I used buckets and buckets full of shredded leaves to bury the plants under their coverings.

It sounds like you might be having one night of cold just on the edge of danger temperatures, but I’d be putting on those row covers if I could.

[macmex]

This morning at 5:30 am, it was 30 F. in my main garden. The lettuce had ice on its leaves. So glad I didn't have any warm weather stuff out yet. Procrastination occasionally pays.

[chrysanthemum]

Good for you, Bon!

[theozarkan]

I got all the tomato and pepper starts moved inside. I think I kind of over did it again. I really had no plans to start 150 plants. lol

I even got my tomatoes that were planted in the mineral tubs moved. I was going to cover them but then I got the bright idea of putting them on my lawn wagon and moving them. It worked but I think my back will be protesting tomorrow.

[chrysanthemum]

Good work.  

150 tomato and peppers plants!  I know a lot of people on this forum grow lots of food, and I admire (and envy) that, but it sure is a lot of work, especially when circumstances like freezes add to the load.  I hope your back doesn’t treat you too badly in the next couple of days and weeks.

[macmex]

I checked the garden thermometer at 5:30 am and it was 23 F. this morning. Water buckets had thick ice on them and all plants were coated in ice. Here's a picture of some apple blossoms, just after sunrise.



Time will tell, but for some reason a lot of things are looking better now, than I expected. Here's a photo of some apple blossoms on the same tree, three hours later.

[chrysanthemum]

One thing that I found particularly hard about February’s hard freeze in Texas was that the damage wasn’t always immediately apparent.  Some plants looked withered immediately, but other plants looked fine once all the snow melted and the temperatures warmed.  I thought they had all pulled through, but after a few days of sunshine, they started showing the damage, and as time went on, it just got worse and worse.  Some things I expected to lose, like peach blossoms, but we also lost whole branches, and that was hard to see.  Our young olive trees had been covered throughout the cold and looked fine when we took the coverings off.  I was so relieved because there is great sentimental value in those.  (My older children had asked to plant olives for as a birthday present for their youngest brother when he turned three.) Gradually, though, the leaves turned brown.  Thankfully two of the three trees have put up good growth from the roots.  I think it was harder on me to see those die back, though, because I thought they had come through all right at first, and I wasn’t prepared psychologically for the damage to take time to show up.

I do wish you all well who had to suffer through such a hard late freeze.  

Potatoes can recover from some freeze damage, Bon, though it might set them back.  I know it can be a race in our climates to get them to maturity before the heat of summer.  You did what you could, and that’s all you can do.

[heavyhitterokra]

Potato vines will burn back to the ground during a heavy freeze, but they nearly always come back from the root later on. My Grandma used to plant 100 pounds of potatoes every Valentine's Day. Some years, they'd rot in the ground from cold, wet weather, but most years they pulled through and grew larger than those that other people planted on Saint Patrick's Day.

This year, it was 15 below zero on February 16th. I don't know if potato vines would have been able to come back from that one?

[heavyhitterokra]

Bon,

I had a potato bug infestation from the bad place two years ago, then, we had a hurricane-force, Oklahoma thunderstorm that hit the vines so hard that it pressure washed them all away. There was no sign of potato bugs for the rest of the season. That one experience sure makes me wonder if a person could blow them off and drown them with a garden hose sprayer? I've never tried it, so I don't know?

Might be a good time to experiment?  Of course, the thunderstorm was area wide, so it power washed the potato bugs off of every plant within quite a distance of my garden.  I don't know it would do any good to kill them off of your potato patch without annihilating them as a whole, locally?