Snow

[Esox]

A quick look around from inside shows no snow, and the hostas look fine, so I suspect you had to be north of Minneapolis to have a problem. The hour-by-hour NWS report shows a low of 34 last night. Predicted low of 33 tonight.

[jgh]

Yup... we dodged the snow here in Plymouth, but the weather radar last night showed bands of snow down to the outermost northern suburbs. Sure hope the tour gardens to the north, like Don Dean's, came out of this OK so far...

[flowerchild59]

Chris, I had to chuckle at your cavorting around the nursery clad only in a hosta leaf.......sorta like sam on true blood running thru the forest

[R. Rock]

Hi,
I woke to 3/4" of snow on the deck this morning.
I am 40 minutes east of twin cities.
Not sure what I plan to cover and to what extent. I will have to see what the forecast is this afternoon. A few years back I would have gone through any lengths to protect everything. I knew the inevidible would come w/ this early spring. My energy and fight might best be left for actual gardening and landscape clients. So, I may have made my mind up to just deal w/ it in the most peaceful way possible.

[Noreaster]

The middle weight that we use is fantastic, however you really need to get these frost blankets on during the day, before the frost hits, otherwise it doesn't work as well. If you get things covered with them the morning before on a sunny day they can easily protect into the 20s as they store a lot of heat underneath.

:

Wait, I thought it was a bad for plants to be covered while the sun was still beating down?

[thy]

Plus 2 C at 4 and 5 AM , no problem at all.
I have had minus 2 C with no problem too, do not know if it was due to the wet soil or not, but they did fine so will yours and I hope Don's and others will handle the low temps too.

Not a problem here, hostas are just started to unfurl, one month later than normal.. and it is still just darn cold 24/7 just ower the freezing point at night time and plus 10 C is a warm day .. so who bought a big flowering Camelia, just becaurse she could not accept the cold anymore .

Chris you better do a pic with all the clothes and different stuff and use it commercial, sort of: we do our best to protect the planst so we cal sell you ....

[party_music50]

The forecast here was for a low of 38F last night. I awoke to look out at a solid inch of snow on everything -- and that was after a day of constant rain! If it warms above freezing, I'll let you know how everything handled it.

[Chris_W]

Sorry to hear about your unexpected weather last night. Snow is usually a pretty good insulator but you might get some pock marks in some of the exposed leaves.

We weren't supposed to get frost last night, so when the weather channel website said "freeze warning" late last night I had a bit of a shock! Then I checked weather underground and they said "frost advisory" for us, which is a lot less worrisome. Luckily we only got down to 34 and there was a breeze all night long. Tonight will be a different story - calm winds and a forecast low of 31. We will start covering things about 4pm.

How did everyone else do last night?

[Linda P]

Once again, my hilltop location has saved the day. I'm on the highest point for miles around, and am always the last to get frost. We didn't get below freezing here, but my friend 30 miles north had a hard freeze. Even the peony leaves were hanging to the ground this morning.
I covered my seedling beds, and just one or two others, but there wasn't enough time for me to do anymore.
Que sera, sera.

Linda P

[twoblackdogs]

We had frost and it was probably down to ~30 at ground level where the hostas are. I'm hoping that the rain we had yesterday and Friday helped keep things ok, it was still pretty wet last night and there was a slight bit of wind. My birdbath in the main hosta garden was not frozen, while the one in my daylilies was, so am hoping the trees helped with the hosta and keeping them warm.

Tonight they are predicting lower temps so hope not - don't have time/equipment to cover everything. I could shoot the sprinklers off - would that do more harm than good?

Either way, I told my neighbor who put out tomatoes this week that he jinxed us by doing that. I hope that is IT for frost for this spring!!

Lela

[renaldo75]

I didn't cover anything yesterday. We were in a frost warning area. The county to the north and all of NE Iowa was in a freeze warning. I was hoping the sheltered location here and all of the tree cover would help and apparently it did. I stepped out at 1:30am and felt a hosta leaf that was very cold. I was expecting to see mush this morning. Fortunately everything looks fine. I am much relieved!!

I hope all of our MN friends' gardens fared OK. Particularly Mr. Dean's. Sorry to hear about the unexpected snows. Hope everyone will be OK tonite.
It's sunny here and supposed to get up to 60.

[jgh]

Haven't confirmed it yet... but heard from a friend who heard from Hideko Gowen that Don Dean and Bob Olson (AHS Journal Editor) gardens got hit pretty hard. It will probably be a while before the damage can be assessed. It seems like the abnormally early, warm March and April spring growth just made us all the more vulnerable to this nasty cold snap.

My heartfelt sympathy to those who suffered and shared relief with those who dodged this bullet...

[dash]

Haven't confirmed it yet... but heard from a friend who heard from Hideko Gowen that Don Dean and Bob Olson (AHS Journal Editor) gardens got hit pretty hard. It will probably be a while before the damage can be assessed. It seems like the abnormally early, warm March and April spring growth just made us all the more vulnerable to this nasty cold snap.

My heartfelt sympathy to those who suffered and shared relief with those who dodged this bullet...

"Ditto " I've brought some pots in covered my Pandora's Box. We're suppose to have freezing tonight and tomorrow night in Maine. I knew this early warm weather was to good to be true for Maine .

[thy]

Sorry for the ones up north

Sprinklers do help a lort, just turn them on if it is a nighrt or 2. I kept my japanese cherry tree blooming for year with the sprinkler

[party_music50]

We had snow Sat. night and everything came through pretty much ok (almost no damage -- it acted as an insulator).

Sunday they predicted a low of 38F and I believed them... instead we had a hard frost. (sigh) It killed all the flowerbuds on some clumps of my bearded iris, did minor damage to some hostas, and completely wiped out my Japanese painted ferns.

Last night was predicted to be a low of 22F, so I pretty much gave up! I moved the annual seedlings in from my little coldframe, pushed the potted hostas back on on the deck, and closed my eyes. The lowest temp I saw during the night was 28, which was warmer than the night before. I haven't been out to assess the damage yet, but I don't expect it to be much (if any) worse than it already was.

Normally these temps wouldn't matter, but our unusually warm winter and nice spring caused everything to be up at least two weeks earlier than normal here.

[Tabby]

Not a picture of a hosta, but this we got this 10 cms of snow in Ontario Saturday! No harm done to the hostas, in fact a couple of them actually grew a few inches on that day. I was VERY surprized!

Snow's all gone now though.

[gardengirl13]

ugh this has been horrible! As with most everyone else we have had such weird weather! This past winter we didn't measurable snow until feb, then got an entire winters worth in one month. Then in march it was very warm as was april. We have had maybe 5 days of around 90 degrees, including a couple last week! Now we have frost/hard freeze warnings every night for the last few nights. In our area we're about 4 weeks ahead of where we're supposed to be. Our lilacs are already gone (normally they're in bloom around May 20th or so) our raspberries and blackcaps all have large buds. The peach tree has baby fruit. The hostas are all completely up. Even the peony is ready to bloom. If it didn't get so cold this weekend and through this week it'd probably bloom this week.

We covered everything with blankets, sheets, towels and everything we could find. Luckily we still had a bunch of nursery pots to add to the mix. We looked in 4 different stores last night to find floating row covers and no one had them! We were going to go to goodwill to get more sheets, but didn't feel like driving all the way there since it's about 20 miles each way and we'd already looked all over locally. This weekend even though we don't need them again (I HOPE!) we'll be buying some row covers and will store them for next spring.

[jgh]

again... my sympathy... it can be so disheartening...

[dash]

This has been a strange winter/spring. It's the first year I've had to deal with frost damage of this magnitude. More frost tonight - Dash

[Noreaster]

We had record low temps last night with a frost warning, so I went out and covered every single hosta in the yard (spent the first half of the day aquiring sheets from thrift stores). It took me maybe 4 hours, and I had enough sheets to do all but one hosta. Sure enough, NO frost this morning. I honestly don't think I'd ever have the energy to mess with that again.