Monday 15 September 2014

How'd You FARE after the FROST?

Posted By: imamsahara 15:49:00 Leave a Reply

Did your vegetables or annual plantings make it through last week's cold snap? The data says the temperatures got down to 34 degrees on 9-11, 33 degrees on 9-12 and 35 degrees on 9-13. Of course how you fared is all dependent on your landscape's warm and cold spots or micro-climates for short. If you covered well and kept things protected during the coldest hours, then you're happy and probably still harvesting and enjoying your annual flower plantings.

I ended up pitching three tomato plants and a tomatillo plant on Wednesday in preparation for the storm. I needed to choose what to cover and what to let go based on the health of the plants and how many sheets and row cover I had on hand. I managed to save a couple of tomato plants, plus several pepper plants, eggplant, herb containers and ornamental annual containers. My green beans got frost nipped on the tips, along with some damage on a nearby squash plant. The okra wasn't happy at all and just turned brown despite being well covered and told to hang in there. I'm not all that unhappy about the beans, okra or squash since they were planted mid-summer following the garlic harvest. They were 50-50 at best.

I'll wrap up the vegetable season in my next blog and finish showing some tomato diseases, wait until you see the downy mildew on my basil plants! Many thanks to Patti O'Neal and her plant diagnostic master gardener volunteers in Jefferson County for giving me the bad news. I can't blame them, they just figured out what was wrong with my plants. Maybe part of the blame is on La Nina or is it El Nino, need to look up which one causes more rain. Sometimes we just have a tough growing season. What a summer, at least the lawn is happy.