Holy cow. Maybe I should just throw in some peas. I was wanting to put something in the ground. what little I do have is in pots, still.

bon

I can't catch a break.
I just watched the weather and Friday the 19th is going to be 30 here. I told brent no matter what i'm planting my toms saterday. wish me luck. i need room for my summer crops.
I have 5 4 foot lights all taken since i potted up. I always wait till it's hot to put my peppers in the ground. They always produce late but I can in a small amount of time.
Poor brent will come in from work and ask whats 4 dinner and i tell him hot or sweet peppers. i'm so mean but he manages. It makes him stronger.
tree

Not to throw another wrench in the stew, but two separate long range forecasts on the US Farm Report this morning have us repeating the summer of 2012. I am not feeling good about that news and am hoping they are way off base.

Susan, crying in her coffee

Bon, If I had peas and wanted to plant them, I'd plant them. Normally I'd say mid-April was too cold for them, but if the cool pattern persists into May, there's a good chance your plants would be able to make peas.

However, it could turn hot in early May and your peas would burn up before they could do anything.

I planted several varieties of peas pretty much on time and the ones with the earliest DTMs now have blooms and peas on them, so from that perspective, I'd say it may be too late for peas sown now to produce. Mine were sow long ago.

Tree, I do wish you luck. You know, at this point, I'd plant and intend to cover up things on cold nights and just hope for the best. Poor Brent! I bet he'll be glad when you get the planting done so life can get back to normal a little bit. Just remind him of all the yummy food your garden will produce this year.

Susan, I am not sure I buy the summer forecast. Long-term forecasting in notorious for error. They did not predict the drought of 2012, which essentially was a 'flash drought' that caught them by surprise. If they are going by forecast models from our government's weather agencies, they certainly could be wrong. Look at the cool weather we've had in March and April as an example. They were forecast to be warmer and drer than average and have been exactly the opposite. Based on that, I have low confidence in their forecast for summer.

Having said that, we're almost always too hot and too dry in summer anyhow, so if we only had an 'average' summer, parts of it still would be brutal.

I can remember a few good summers here when gardening was easier than it has been the last couple of years: 2002, 2004, 2007 (too wet until July but great after that) and, for me, 2010 was an awesome year but in parts of OK the 2011 drought really began in 2010. Even 2012 was outstanding in terms of the harvest, but I had to really water a lot and work much harder than usual to get the harvest. It wasn't as easy in 2012 as in 2004, 2007 and 2002.

All the rain we are having isn't helping the plants here in our county as much as you'd think. Despite the rain, our 4" plant available water on the mesonet map has been staying around 0.55 to 0.58. At anything below 0.50 you should be watering....so even with recurring rain every week, in our county the soil moisture levels still are marginal and I find that very discouraging. I assume the thirsty soil and plants just slurp up whatever rain falls which leaves the soil still looking too dry.

For what it is worth, to me this year feels like 2002---we kept having cold nights here until at least mid-May in 2002 but I was able to protect plants and keep them alive and had an awesome garden year. I'm not saying that this year will be like 2002, but the late cold spells have me hoping it will be.

I am going to plant this weekend and next week as if the cool weather is gone, but I know I'll have to cover up plants on one night next week and maybe on two. Then, the models show another cold spell the week after that.

I looked at the NWS Website this morning and noticed there is a threat of wintery precip falling in NW OK next week. I imagine the people there have just about had it with this weather!

You know, rain is tricky. We didn't get enough of it early in the year, but so much has fallen lately that I feel like it has been too wet all year. I looked at my county's data, and we are still below average in rainfall for the year-to-date through the end of April. If we can get a couple of inches of rain to fall before the month ends, we might end the month with average year-to-date rainfall. That might not sound impressive, but in this case average would be better than below-average. It still is far too dry here.

Dawn

Dawn,

One thing to keep in mind with these outlooks from the CPC (6-10 and 8-14 day outlooks) is that they have no human input when created on Saturday or Sunday. They are automatically generated straight from model output. The ones issued Mon-Fri have someone there at CPC doing QC on the output. If you notice closely, you'll see significant differences between what's released on Friday and the following Monday compared to the Saturday and Sunday in between.

It doesn't mean they are not correct on the weekends, but they can get a little squirrelly looking sometimes.

Lee