Second Freeze in May

 wobblers over blackberries

I was almost going to title this post “expletive deleted”.  Durn! It hit 31 degrees F.  here this morning.  I turned on woobler sprinklers  at 2 a.m. when the temps hit 38.  They’re running on strawberries and blackberries this time.  Last evening the forecast was for 36.  But because I am in a low place (the blessing and curse of creek bottoms) I can expect a little lower than the predictions.  After seeing the forecast out I went to prepare.  It took less than an hour to locate, put in place, test, fix, test again, and then I left running the sprinklers for the blackberries.  That inch and a half of rain was nice but nowhere near enough as dry as it has been.  So running the sprinklers all night on the blackberries was a good thing for the blooms that are forming and just starting to open as well as for freeze protection.  It was the strawberry sprinklers that I turned on at 2.  I had run them on May 2^nd  almost all night to protect from that bad freeze and then with the inch and a half of rain we had I wanted to limit how much more water the plants get.  I don’t want to over water them. 

 covering peppers

In a previous post there is a picture of  rows of newly transplanted peppers.  Here is a photo of the same peppers on the way to being covered in mulch.  I felt like the forecast was telling me that I needed to cover with mulch all the pepper and tomato plants in the field.  I have 9 rows of peppers out.   (next week I’ll transplant out 6 more rows)  That’s just under 200 plants out there now.  Tedious task.  One of the things I’m good at is doing tedious tasks.  It took me an hour and twenty minutes to cover all the peppers.  So about 3 a minute.  Using the cart in the picture and hauling from the bales of prairie hay placed around the garden I carefully covered up each plant.   Then I did the same for the tomatoes.  Next year I am going to try to afford enough frost cover and plastic to put the early plants under low tunnels.  This year I needed to save my plants tedious task or no.  

frosted peppers

Here’s what the peppers rows look like this morning.  Good thing I covered them.  That white color is frost.   Luckily even though we have had  blue sky over head this morning we've had  clouds to the east.  The sun has been up for almost an hour and a half and still is behind clouds.  It’s just now starting to break out.  The temp is up to 39 and rising.  This is a good thing if the plants get completely thawed before the sun light hits them it causes less damage. 

OK, here comes the sun.  Here I go back to the garden.  Damage report or not  in the next post.

The 450 cabbages, garlic and onions in the field can handle the frost. They’ll all be fine.