Nothing! I am doing NOTHING. I even still have my aloe vera outside.

I am not going through the in, out, cover, uncover mode yet. Everything that survives, can hang around.

Everything that doesn't, gets to go to the next stage... in the compost bin.

Moni

I brought in the potted ones I winter over indoors, like the lemon. I covered only the lettuce and fig. I picked what few green tomatoes I had and the peppers and Armenian melon. I dug up and potted the stevia. This it.

I didn't cover anything more than I had already done on Friday, so if it gets cold several things will be over, peas, beans, peppers, etc. I am trying to protect the winter squash plant so I will at least get to taste the squash and maybe even save seeds. That will only happen if we get a few more weeks of nice weather without another frost.

We have protected most things but were not very prepared so they are only covered with a tent of sheets and tarp. I am really hoping that will be enough as we have not go to eat any ripe tomatillos yet, and hardly any tomatoes. We did not have any frost here last night, but our forecast low for tonight is 34 in Norman so I am pretty nervous. I am not ready to let our summer crops die yet!

Don't have much left to protect so I'm with Moni - NOTHING. I've maybe got a dozen green tomatoes and maybe as many jalepeno's. I'll give those up to the Gardening Gods and say "good-ridance" to this gardening year. I'm lucky because Seedmana dropped by a bag of various peppers for me to enjoy & save seeds. Thank you, Seedmama!!!(But I've still got 2 sugar-baby melons that I'm playing russian-roulette with....) Last nite I brought in my banana trees and chocolate mint.

It's always bittersweet to watch for the first frost/freeze but we've gotta get thru this in order to get on with next year...which (as every gardener says) has got to be better.

Paula

DIEEEE. Actually I never cover anything because I have too much and too little patience. I will be sad though if we lose everything soon.

I suppose I could have covered my tomato plants with one of the large tarps I have, but I'm kinda ready to let things go for the year. The only things I still have growing the veggie garden are a few pepper plants that never did much all year, the pole beans that I can't really cover, and the tomatoes. Everything else is perennial (strawberries and raspberries).

I pulled the row covers back to let the birds in. I have such an insect problem it seemed that I was getting more damage with the row covers on. After I get the summer stuff out of the way I will try low hoops and leave them open during the day. I dont know what is in my garden that taste so good, but the bird are going APE in there. I even had a hawk in the garden when I came home from church.

I will mow down 5 rows of Purple hull vines in a day or 2 and start preparing that area for something else.

Larry

We put up a hoop house over broccoli and Brussels sprouts, though I suspect they would have made it. We also set a 10'X4' hoop house over most of a row of tomatillos, which are in full swing. We threw some plastic over a row of okra (BIG plastic) and blankets & tarps over some peppers. For some reason our hot peppers didn't fruit at all, this year, until the very end of August. So we have very few ripe for seed. I also popped a black trash bag over our lemon grass plant and one over a lone Habanero plant, which has only about four or five peppers (all immature).

At 3:45 AM it's 32 F. So by 7 AM I bet it will be 29 F That's really cold!

George
Tahlequah, OK

I covered everything, I am just not ready for my garden season to end. I am fighting the good fight to the bitter end! LOL!

I even covered the Brussels sprouts. They would have been ok, but I was not going to chance it. I have seeds started for my low tunnel experiments. So, I will be gardening in a coat this year. LOL!

I did NOTHING, NADA. ZILCH, ZERO. I imagine the freeze (yes, it got down to 31 degrees last night) got the Okra and melon. I say melon - I only got 2 and something grabbed the other fairly ripe one and ran off with it the other day. If they did it cuz they were hungry, that's okay with me.

My exposure is North. In summer I get lots of sun, tho, the curbside plantings get more exposure to cold, but behind that, I have 2 big pines, and tons of plantings so it is kind of a microclimate. They should be all right. We'll see. I hope my babies (caterpillars) made it. I have them on the porch with lots of boxes, chair, table, etc., providing some extra warmth, so crossing my fingers.

This morning, one of the weather guys was asked by several viewer e-mails, if we would now have a warm remaining fall. He answered honestly - "I don't know".

Susan

I spent an inordinate amount of time covering up plants, mostly on Friday, but then also for a little while yesterday afternoon when I decided to cover up as much of the winter squash as possible.

Our forecast was for 35 degrees. At our house, we went down to 31 degrees and at the Burneyville Mesonet station, an official low temperature of 29 was recorded. We had pretty heavy frost in open, exposed areas, but not as much frost on the ground under trees and other tall plants.

I haven't ventured out to the garden yet to uncover plants because it is still pretty cold out there.

I'd really like to leave them covered up for tonight, because the current forecast low for our area is 46 degrees. I know 46 degrees is a fairly safe temperature, but if we drop down to 38 instead, we'd likely have frost. I sure would be unhappy if the plants were damaged tomorrow morning after surviving last night and this morning. I don't know that I'll leave them covered up for a fourth day though.

Larry, That's always a concern for me when I cover plants. I am sure there are some grasshoppers underneath the row covers and it is likely they've been chomping away under the row covers ever since Friday. I don't really know a way around it.

As for the birds in the garden, our garden has been full of birds for the last 3 or 4 weeks. I believe they mostly are feasting on grasshoppers, although they'll eat many other insects as well. Whatever it is that the birds are eating, I'm happy to have them in the garden assisting with pest control.

Betty, I usually bring my potted lemon tree into the house for the winter, but this time I just dragged it into the garage and hope it stayed warm enough. I didn't want to bring it inside for just a couple of days and then carry it back out. I'm not planning on bringing it inside until the lemons finish maturing, but I may have to put it in the garage for a few more cold nights.

Some years I just let the first freeze take the garden, but the peppers, southern peas and snap beans were producing so well right now after producing not-so-well in the high heat of the summer that I would like to keep them going for another few weeks.

Susan, I would like to think we'll have a nice month or so of Indian Summer now that the first cold spell has hit (and of course it is what I'm hoping for), but in my heart I don't think we will. I'm at the point where, if we have a couple more weeks of good weather, I'll be thrilled.

Dawn

We have nothing worth covering left out there. There are a couple tomatoe plants, a Sungold that has lots of tomatoes, but the flavor has declined so that I am beginning to question the wisdom of trying to get tomatoes to ripen in the greenhouse over the winter--especially since my late tomatoes are just starting to bloom. There were two banana pepper plants and three bells that I picked most of the peppers from and gave some away. Otherwise the garden has been cleared. Well except for the sweet potatoes, but DH just went out and said they don't appear to be nipped. We know it frosted in parts of the county this morn because we were 15 miles away at Dad's loading calves at 7 and wading frost to do it. But he lives at the bottom of a hill and we live on top of one. Anyway we have given up on the summer garden and are now waiting for the salad greens in the greenhouse to come up. We did plant the cold frames (2 4x4 each) and have enough greens to cook some, but the lettuce and spinach isn't big enough for a salad yet. The grasshoppers that got inside ate that but left the mustard plants alone. We had a good crop of most things this year despite the weather and the freezers are full, so we can't complain.

I woke up at 5:15 and checked the Mesonet temp for our county and it showed 34. I wasn't sleepy so I sat at my computer for awhile and still had the Mesonet temp map on one screen and I saw it drop to 33, so I went outside and checked a thermometer and it was 36 at my house and that was probably around 6AM.

It is 53 with some wind right now. Everything has been uncovered except the low tunnel which I plan to leave in place. Everything survived both covered and uncovered. The squash plants on the tall trellis look a little beat up after having all the covers on top of them for three days and getting pulled around a little, but they should still be good enough to ripen the squash. Now hopefully we are back on schedule and things will continue until Halloween.

My extra 3 degrees was probably provided by the lake.

Dawn your temps were lower than mine the entire time I was watching this morning, and I know that you house normally goes below that Mesonet reading. Hope you had enough protection in place. Your station stayed on 31 for a long time, then I think dipped briefly to 30, then right back to 31. Ours was at 34 at the time, but that didn't reflect my area.

I think we were lucky here, the front yard got pretty frosty (as did our cars... scrabbling round this morning trying to find the ice scraper was not fun!) but the back yard seemed to stay a bit warmer. I thought it would be the opposite.

I took a quick look round this morning and the only thing that seems to be damaged is some of the flowers on the pumpkins, but those were up on the deck and we ran out of sheets to cover them.

Dorothy, That's one reason I don't try really hard with off-season container tomatoes or with tomatoes grown indoors--the decline in the flavor is awful, and after October has ended, they grow and ripen at a snail's pace. Some years I've kept them alive by dragging them into the garage on cold nights, and leaving them in there on cold days. They do flower and set fruit, but the tomatoes that set in November-January took twice as long as usual to ripen and their flavor still was lacking and their size was as much as 1/4 the usual size.

I think that if I used a heater to keep the greenhouse at daytime and nighttime temperatures like we typically have in May or early June, the winter tomatoes would taste better and maybe grow faster and size up better, but it isn't worth what it would cost to keep the greenhouse that warm.

When I was removing row covers this morning, I noticed that some of the row covers a very thick and heavy layer of frost on them and others had a lighter patchier frost. Regardless, everything that was covered survived unscathed, except for three leaves on the Seminole squash. They were blackened and withered. They had been covered, but I suspect there was a rip in the row cover over them and the frost came in through that tear in the cover. As for the plants I left uncovered, most of them were fine overall but the upper foliage was damaged while the lower foliage and, in the case of the peppers, the fruit beneath the upper foliage, were not damaged.

The plant that looks the worst? The big pecan tree. Its upper foliage is definitely frost-bitten or frozen. Everything underneath the upper foliage is fine. The four o'clocks were fine, but most of them get some protection from surrounding trees. All the container plants that we dragged into the garage on Friday are fine, and definitely were happy to be back outside in natural light this morning instead of indoors under fluorescent lighting.

The last time I looked, they had raised our forecast low for tonight to 50 so I feel a little bit better about that than the 46 degrees forecast earlier.

However, for those of you who are new to the forum and haven't heard me say this 500 times in the last 5 years, in one spring we had a forecast high of 50 and I didn't cover up my plants (it was early May) and the temperature dropped to 32 and almost everything froze back to the ground. So, even at 50 I feel a little nervous about the temperatures, and likely always will, but not nervous enough that I'll cover up everything again tonight.

It is sunny, clear and perfectly gorgeous outside right now with a current temperature of 62 degrees. I hope the rest of this month is like today, but not like last night.

Larry, I only found lady bugs and green lacewings on the plants underneath the floating row covers as I uncovered them this morning, but I had grasshoppers sitting on top of the row covers. I assume they were trying to find a way to get to the plants or they were just sunning themselves and waiting for me to uncover the plants. I went to the garden shed and got my spray bottle of Take-Down spray and hit each grasshopper with several squirts from that bottle. I doubt those hoppers are still alive or will give me any more trouble.

Dawn

I just got home from work. Unlike most of you, I have mostly ornamentals.

I hadn't covered anything.

On my ride (yes, I rode my bike to work) to work this morning I saw lots of frost on cars. YIKES was my thought.

Imagine my surprise... when I still see my castor beans upright!

Moni

Yep...put out row cover over my kind-of-late Bush Beans becuase they're just now flowering. I did that Friday afternoon and I've just left it there...I'll take it off tonight probably. Who knows if I'll actually get beans - in a "normal" year, they'd probably be bearing up until Christmas with a little covering now and then (I'm kind of kidding there - what's with this early frost stuff anyway?!)
I also picked all of my remaining herbs, tied them in a bunch and they're now hanging to dry in my kitchen.

Sharon

Didn't cover anything. Nothing swooned.

I covered up all of my tomatoes and peppers (bells and jalapenos) with old sheets and tarps. The pumpkin vine has grown all over into the peppers now so part of that got covered as well. Overall I was very happy how everything survived. Leaves that were touching the sheet died, but all in all im glad to make it through the weekend. Not glad with having to scrap ice off of the car though...

At what temp will the mosquitoes go bye-bye?

Susan

It was so cold in my house this morning, I had no doubt it froze last night and the morning news confirmed the 32 degrees...well...I don't know what happened, but I didn't see a lick of damage in my garden this evening. I was kinda happy. I am not quite ready to say good bye yet.

I did cover everything, but then I forgot to uncover it. LOL!

I will do that in the morning for sure.

Wacky weather! GRRRRRR.....

Carol, I looked at our Mesonet station's meteogram and it hit 32 around 3 a.m. and then went a little above freezing, and then was back at or below freezing from around 4 a.m. to about 8:20 a.m. That was a pretty long time at or below freezing, but even the uncovered plants only showed some damage....nothing died back to the ground.

Susan, Mosquitoes are hard to figure out. Sometimes if we have a really warm spell in winter, I'll see them for a few days. Different species have different tolerations of cold weather, so some die but others sort of lie low and manage to hang on....kinda of like the butterflies, bees and moths we often see outside occasionally in the middle of winter. Usually the mosquito activity drops significantly by November though. I don't know if it will drop earlier this year since we have had earlier than normal freezing and near-freezing temperatures.

Lisa, Maybe it didn't stay cold enough long enough at your house for anything to be damaged. In my garden some plants that weren't covered showed no damage, but others showed some. None showed really severe damage and we were at/below freezing for a long time.

Ezzirah, I've done that before. It generally doesn't hurt the plants if they are covered with a breathable fabric. It can roast them if they are under plastic without some air space separating the plants from the plastic.

Oklahoma has been the land of wacky weather all year long. I guess it is silly for us to think it might change now. We all probably should expect wacky weather right through the end of this calendar year......and likely beyond it too.

Dawn