Yeah, we only had a 30% chance of snow so I was surprised when I opened the window this morning to a white world! My poor spinach and carrots--I didn't cover them! They've hung in there through the ice and snow so far under a frost blanket...I don't know about the inch of snow, though...

They need snow to protect them from the cold; I'm not sure an inch is enough. I am glad for my 3 inches of snow because the weatherman said negative 6 for tomorrow morning. All my pets are inside.

It was a surprise! This morning, at 3:30, it is 3 F.! I believe we received about 3" of snow yesterday. But first... it sleeted.

George
Tahlequah, OK

Went out at 4:15 to do chores and our well pump quit while I was filling waterers! Now I'll have to pull the pump. This is not the kind of weather I would like to be working on a well pump!

George

George - you'll have company in spirit. I myself just got up, but DH was just about to leave for work and WOOP! The water froze.

It's -3 here in NE Norman. I didn't really want to wash my hair just yet anyway......

Paula

Scott, Well, what in the world would we have to complain about here if not for the weather? There are months (and years) where I think gardening here would be perfect if only the weather would half-way cooperate. I doubt that's ever going to happen though. I'd like to have a year where the weather cooperates perfectly (2002 and 2004 were almost perfect here, but nothing's been close to that since then).

Y'all, I wouldn't mind having snow, but we didn't get any., and I'm happy we don't have ice or sleet or freezing rain in any shape, form or fashion.

I'm in the warm part of OK (grin), so we were a toasty warm 7 degrees this morning with a wind chill of only -3. I just checked our front porch thermometer and it is showing a nice, warm 23 degrees in the shade. Our forecast high is only 29 though, so it isn't going to warm up much more.

George, I'm sorry to hear about the well pump. I have been having to deal with ice in the chicken waterers every day, but at least we don't have a well pump to deal with....especially a frozen one. Last night I left heat lamps on in the two chicken coops for the chickens, and I rarely do that.

Helen, All our cats and dogs are inside and not necessarily happy about it. The cats didn't go out yesterday and aren't going to go out today either. They are pretty mad about that too, but I have appeased them somewhat by cutting some catnip from the garden and bringing it inside for them to enjoy. The dogs only stay out long enough to do their doggie business and then run back inside. I mostly make the cats stay inside on days like this because we feed the birds, and we have huge numbers of wild birds eating outside. If I let the cats out, they really don't mess with the birds (because I yell at them, throw things at them and squirt them with a water gun to teach them not to hunt birds)....but the birds don't know that so that stop eating and go away when the cats are out.

Y'all be careful in the extreme wind chills y'all are having up there. As bad as it is here, it is so much worse for y'all the further north and east you are in the region.

At least the sun is shining here today.

I'm headed south in a little while, but I doubt Dallas will be much warmer than we are here near Marietta.

Dawn

Kicked DH out of bed last night to go down to drip all the inside faucets because I got nervous about them possibly freezing. A handyman came to replace our storm door yesterday afternoon and I thought he was crazy to be working outside with the temps in the teens and windchill just bone cold. I nearly froze just running from my car to the store when running errands. I got home and got some hot cocoa on for him, stat.

When DH left for work this morning, he forgot to close the garage door and when I went down there about a half hour later, our garage had been wide open. Worried about my hibiscus and lemon tree and palm trees and the other things I'd been overwintering out there. We'll see if they survived their polar plunge. Fingers crossed.

Dawn, I would willingly make up a comprehensive list of things for us to complain about if the weather would calm down. I could organize it by theme and we could rotate the complaints so that we always have something fresh to bemoan. :)

Mia, I hope your tender plants survived the cold. Maybe the cold air hadn't managed to infiltrate the garage via the open door quite long enough to hurt them. Often, plants like citrus trees can take a certain degree of sub-freezing temperatures for up to 4 hours before damage occurs. I left two citrus trees out all night last spring when we went off to a wildfire and it was dark when we came home and I simply didn't see the trees (they were sitting right by the garage too) and forgot to bring them inside. The next morning I found them frozen (I believe we had dropped down to 23 degrees when we were forecast to stay above freezing anyhow) and figured they were goners. I watered them and moved them to a protected area, and a couple of weeks later they started leafing out. They are alive still, though they lost a year's worth of growth to that cold overnight experience.

Okievegan, Alright! Make the list. Organize it and then we even could assign different people different months to moan and groan about whatever is on the list for that month. : ) Seriously, though, it has got to be incredibly hard to make a living in agriculture here because Ma Nature has 1,001 ways to destroy your crop.....and often throws multiple issues at the plants all in the same day!

When I lived and gardened in Texas a mere 80 miles south of where we live and garden in OK, gardening seemed so much more simple. I planted stuff. It rained. The stuff grew. We picked it. We ate it. The End. Here? You have to fight flooding rains, searing drought, high winds, tornadoes, wildfires, hail, etc.,before you even can hope to get a harvest......and then the next day you have to get up and fight all of them all over again. To get a great crop here I use tall garden fences, lightweight row cover, heavy weight row cover, bird netting and chicken wire over hoops for hail protection, mulch to keep the soil cool, drip irrigation to keep the garden watered, raised beds to keep the plants from drowning during heavy rainfall, etc. In Texas I just put the stuff in the ground and it grew. Why is it so much harder here????Gardening doesn't have to be as hard as our weather makes it, but here we are, and the weather we have is the weather we have. What are we going to do? Pack up and leave? I don't think so. (And, to be fair, the same part of Texas where I gardened so blissfully in the 1980s and 1990s has had its share of wicked weather challenges in recent years, so maybe it is harder there now than it was when we lived there.)

My dad was a gardener, as were virtually all his brothers and sisters, and their parents before them were farmers, and my mom's dad was a rancher. So, I know from experience that there are many challenges in agriculture, whether you're a home gardener or a professional grower. Primary among those challenges is our erratic weather. The weather always has caused trouble for folks growing plants, but it seems like the weather-related challenges are so much more fierce now than I remember from past decades. I feel like Mother Nature has just gone berserk ever since about 2005. I want our old mother back!

Dawn