Frost/Ice

[bakerhardwoods]

I have an update on the frost damage to my 52 tomato plants that were hit with cold. First, when I was looking at temperature on various local weather stations in the wee hours of Saturday morning, one on my direction from town was at about 26 degrees. It is a couple of miles west of my place and I just ignored it as an anomaly of private weather stations, but it could have had colder than 29 degrees.
I had some plants that had a black plastic pot with the bottom cut out around them (put there at planting) and with another pot or bucket over that, they survived. They were the biggest plants, but there were a few planted at the same time without the first black plastic pot around them that are dead down to the mulch. The double cover may have been a factor, or possibly the base black pot had increased the soil temperature. I have the ground covered with mulch (partially rotted horse sawdust bedding -- with horse manure of course), so the ground cover may have caused a lower soil temperature.
I have pulled back the mulch on most of the "dead" plants and there is about 1.5" of stem out of the ground that looks alive and most have another couple of inches of stem in the ground. I plan to replant with the 20 or so remaining plants I have and just leave the rest for a while to see if they regrow.
Finally, when pulling back mulch, I found one small plant had gotten almost totally covered with mulch. It was still green. I did not think of covering the tomato plants with mulch or soil (like I did the potatoes), but I think that might have helped (covered with mulch, then covered with a pot or bucket). I would say "live and learn" but I'm afraid life has too much "live, learn, forget, relearn"!!

[JRinPA]

A loose wall of mulch or wood chips held up with the inverted bucket might indeed provide more protection. That is something I will have to remember. I am the same way, I should write everything down. But when I do write it down, I lose the notebook...

[ramapojoe]

I used to put plants in as early as possible and more times than not I would get stressed out over a few cold nights. Finally started planting at a later date when night time temps stay above 50.

[bakerhardwoods]

update -- I had about 20 or so "extra" tomato plants that I used to replanted the ones looking the most dead. When I dug about 5 of the 20 replants up, I could see signs of life so I repotted them. They grew and it was enough to replace some that I hoped would regrow, but failed. I left a couple of the plants alongside the new plants and they grew, and now aren't a lot smaller than the new plants. i would post pictures, but haven't figured that out yet!

[slugworth]

go advanced instead of using quick reply

[bakerhardwoods]

I'm making an attempt to post a couple of pictures. One shows two tomato plants in one cage. The one on the left is a replant, the one on the right frozen down to about 1.5" of stem and then it grew from the remaining live stem. The other picture is of plants that survived the freeze. Many of the forum participants are from warmer regions than zone 5b and have tomatoes much further along.



The two jpg's show in preview, but they are sideways. I don't know why, they show okay on my computer.


Tim

[JRinPA]

I'm glad some came back for you. They'll probably ripen the first tomatoes the same week. I'd say congrats overall for a good garden recovery.

[Koala Doug]

Originally Posted by bakerhardwoods

The two jpg's show in preview, but they are sideways. I don't know why, they show okay on my computer.

Hey, Tim!


The rotating image thing is a by-product of the orientation of the device (camera or phone) when the image was taken and the EXIF tags attached to said image.

Within the EXIF tags is a part that describes the orientation that should be displayed... but only some programs/devices read those tags and make the changes automatically.

The work-around is to manually rotate the image using a photo-editing or viewing program and re-saving the picture in the proper orientation.