DH has set out about 60 of the 144 tomatoes we started from seed back in mid-March. The sugar snap peas are looking great, the lovage is 3-feet tall and bushy and I just bought a half-dozen geraniums on sale. So what's the latest weather forecast? Frost, of course.
And yesterday's early evening storm almost destroyed the rest of the tomato seedlings. They were setting in enamel dishpans under the house eaves and we didn't realize the pans had filled with water till this morning. DS and I carefully drained the water and set everything on the grass to dry out this afternoon under the overcast sky. Some of the newspaper pots completely disintegrated and several plants had enough dirt washed out that the roots were exposed. It's mainly the Heinz F1 hybrid plums, some of the Brandywines and a few of the Yellow Pears that were affected. Almost all the Mortgage Lifters went in the ground on Friday or Saturday. I think they'll all make it but we'll put them back in the garage overnight to be safe.
DH called me from work after hearing the weather report so I'm off to gather baskets, plastic containers and some of the 2-liter bottles he's planning to recycle as individual plant waterers. (He cuts the bottom off the bottle, inverts it and buries about one-third of it in the ground to one side of the vegetable transplant. See photo below.) We'll cover each garden-planted tomato, the emerging pole beans and anything else that should be protected from frost when he gets home later this evening. Maybe the next couple of nights will be the last of the frost warnings -- and, of course, this isn't as bad as a couple of years ago when we had a HARD freeze on May 30.
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