Freeze Warning on March 19th

In a really unusual happening, we have a freeze warning tonight.  As I type this, temps are predicted to get down to 31 degrees tonight and stay that way for several hours.  That would put a severe hurting on our garden.  We have every single thing planted in the garden with the exception of blackeye peas, purple hull peas and Ozark razorback peas.  We did our best to protect them, but we won't know where we stand until tomorrow afternoon.

We have saved a big inventory of landscape pots, 5 gallon buckets and tarps.  This afternoon, with temps in the 50's I got to work.  The number one task was tomatoes.  I have about 50 tomato plants that range in height from 6-12" tall.  I covered them up with buckets/pots and did the same with the peppers.  Then I stretched a large tarp over the snap beans and then over most of the tomatoes that were covered with buckets, hoping the extra layer of insulation would help.  Some of the tomatoes have blooms on them!  I covered the cucumbers as well.  They're located on the bottom left under the trellis.  Some items, like carrots can withstand a freeze so they needed no protection.

On the backside of the garden, I covered all of the squash, okra, eggplant, tomatillos, basil and butterbeans.  The onions should be fine without any covering.  I was a little concerned that the wind would blow the pots off of the plants, so on some of them I placed sticks or dirt clods on top to weigh them down.  As it turns out, as soon as the sun set, the winds diminished, so the weights weren't necessary.

I moved to the bed in the side yard and covered all 112 potato plants as well as the butternut squash, cantaloupes and watermelon plants.  Planting this early was somewhat of a gamble, but the Farmer's Almanac showed the average last spring frost date for our zip code was March 1st.  A freeze this late is an outlier indeed.

Rushing to plant everything this early is a risk; however, sometimes it pays off as you begin harvesting prior to the onslaught of pest pressure.  After we finished covering everything, I told Tricia that we did what we could.  If we lose everything, we'll just replant.  We'll see how it goes.