There's not a lot that will sprout in typical December weather, but you never know. The way that our weather is seesawing wildly back and forth (highs in the 70s and 80s today, highs in the 30s on Monday) makes it hard to predict. The warm days may help keep the ground temperatures warm enough for something to sprout.

Sometimes spinach or some other greens will sprout (albeit slowly) at this time of the year, but then if we turn very cold while the plants are young, they may not survive. My soil temperatures at 4" are averaging around 50 degrees. In northern OK, the mesonet soil temp 3-day average is considerably cooler---in the lower 40s. The colder the soil temperatures, the slower most seeds are to sprout at this time of the year. Maybe kale or collards would sprout. Sprouting is just part of the battle because they will be vulnerable to cold temperatures until they have been exposed to enough of them to build up some tolerance of the cold temperatures.

You might be able to get one of the usual winter cover crops to sprout, but I've never planted any of them when it already is this cold (cold in general, this weekend's temperatures give us a false sense of warmth..... and it won't last).

I can tell you what has sprouted in the soil in my garden the last couple of weeks: henbit, borage (it is likely to freeze Monday night, or since I left the garden gate open, maybe rabbits will get it before it freezes), catnip, chamomile, larkspur, Texas bluebonnets, dandelions, and a couple of poppies. I started to say that I usually don't see poppies popping up out of the soil until December, and then I realized it is almost December.

At this time of the year, anything that sprouts in my garden serves mainly as food for various wild things.....song birds eat the lettuce, rabbits eat everything else growing in the ground, but the weeds, herbs and wildflowers often recover from being nibbled. Nothing eats the Swiss chard because it is in containers too tall for rabbits to reach. I only grow winter lettuce in tubs in the greenhouse because it gets eaten if grown in the ground. Sometimes I see squirrels in the garden in winter, but I can't say I've ever seen them eating anything.

You could consider this an experiment and toss various leftover cool season crop seeds onto the ground and see what sprouts. When I did that one year, although it likely was in early November, I got lots of various kales, cabbages and collards, as well as beets and turnips to sprout. Some of them made it through most of the winter, freezing out probably in late January, but others survived and never froze. I think that year that the collards and cabbage, and a few beets (the greens froze down to the ground, but then regrew in February) were the best survivors.

Have you planted your garlic yet? If not, it isn't too late for it as it will sprout eventually.

I think the best chance of getting something to sprout and grow would come from sowing seeds of some of the most cold-hardy "other" greens that are less commonly grown and eaten here: claytonia, mache', creasy greens, and maybe even arugula.

Tomorrow I will sprinkle a few things out there. I'm going to start some greens in the green house. I wish I had had time BEFORE all this lovely weather.

I watered everything, before the freeze gets here. I sprinkled a little spinach, chard and radish seeds in the fall beds. The radishes are becoming weeds in my yard, so I bet they will sprout. I am amazed at the chamomile! I had trouble getting it started, now seeds have sprouted in the pot and it is surviving with the collards up next to the house. I also planted some greens seeds in the greenhouse. The sun was lovely. 68 degrees out there. Down to 25 tonight and tomorrow. Sigh. I pulled a 6" carrot! It is beautiful.

Chamomile is one of my faves because it will grow everywhere. Why stay there in the garden, when you also can pop up randomly in the gravel driveway, yard, pasture, etc. I mulch more heavily around chamomile than I once did because it reseeds so vigorously and, even though I love chamomile, I don't want to have to yank out 1 million and one seedlings in winter and spring. Like you, I had a hard time getting it started the first time I tried to raise it from seed, but it has naturalized all over creation since then.

Congrats on the carrot!

So far today (and I don't think it will get any warmer) we have hit 79 degrees and it actually almost felt hot outside. (Well, hot for the last day of November.) I think our low will be around 34-36, and we have a real slim chance of getting freezing rain and/or drizzle overnight or tomorrow morning.

I wish I could capture today's weather in a jar and open up that jar in the winter months when I need a little sunshine and heat. Even the butterflies and bees are out flying around nectaring today, but I expect I won't see them out tomorrow.

Really, though, after a couple of cold days and nights it warms up again, so by the end of the week, it should be reasonably pleasant again. That is one of the hardest things about gardening in Oklahoma---about the time we decide it has become too cold to plant another single thing and expect the seeds to germinate, then we get warm days again that make us want to run out there and scatter some seeds.

I did notice in the pastures that the yarrow plants already are up a couple of inches, and there's some winter rye grass and oats sprouting randomly here and there. Driving along in a car you don't really notice it, but if you're out walking in the pastures, there's lots of tiny green plants sprouted down low to the ground. I found more bluebonnet plants today---about an inch tall.

If the weather moderates in mid to late Feb. or early Mar. you can plant any kinds of greens or carrots and you might get an early crop.

I don't have any truly bare ground in the garden at this point. We have had warm weather in December, following that brutally cold weather a couple of weeks ago, and stuff is sprouting everywhere that the mulch is not too thick to prevent it from sprouting. Even in the mulch, I see a few bits of green. Mostly what I am seeing is larkspur, poppies, yarrow, tansy, hollyhocks, Malva sylvestris 'Zebrina' and chamomile, but also some cool-season weeds and grasses. There's lots of henbit sprouting, but I let it grow, because it is one of the few plants that will be flowering in December through March when the bees and butterflies are frantically looking for something----anything----in bloom.

I generally broadcast sow winter greens (the more cold-hardy ones like mache' and creasy greens) in January and sometimes even spinach and lettuce just to see what comes up. However, if I don't put floating row cover or bird netting over them, the birds nibble them down to the ground relentlessly. It isn't just gardeners who need/enjoy green plants in winter. Some years we overseed the lawn with winter rye grass, generally if autumn has been extremely dry. We like having green grass around the house in a bad wildfire winter. We didn't plant rye grass this year, but it has popped up in scattered places around the yard, undoubtedly from seed produced by the prior year's plants. Our dogs and cats love to eat the green rye grass in winter, and sometimes I sow oats or wheat for them to have some winter greens too.

One of the buckets in the green house has sprouted. I can't renenber what I put there, but when they're bigger I will know. May have been lettuce mix. Every thing has survived in the beds except maybe the sickly brussels sprouts and a couple of broccoli plants that had already been harvested. Go figure, 2 of the plants are making new broccoli sprouts like crazy and the others are just dead.

We had such odd autumn weather this year, with November having that wickedly cold spell and then December being milder. I'm not surprised some plants have survived.

I had some broccoli plants survive the horrific summer of 2011, even though I stopped watering in July. They were at the west end of the garden where they had afternoon shade from an adjacent pecan tree that grows outside the garden fence. We got busy with fires beginning in June and I basically closed the garden gate and walked away from it because I was at fires day and night and just didn't have the time to water or harvest or anything. Every now and then I'd run into the garden and harvest a squash (it was one of those years with no squash pests whatsoever) or a tomato.

I never expected the broccoli plants (or anything else) to survive. I think we had a little under 12" of rain in Jan-August, and then some rain began falling near the end of August. Sometime in the autumn, after enough rain had fallen that we weren't running to fires constantly, I walked into the garden and discovered Piricicaba broccoli plants green, growing well and in full production. They produced broccoli into December before a very cold night got them. The only other plants that made it through the drought and produced well in autumn were the Seminole Pumpkins. Garden surprises like that are fun.

That broccoli at the west end of the garden was planted there in the hope that the shade would keep it going later into summer. In that respect, it was an experiment that succeeded. Still, I never expected to see the plants alive in the fall. I am not sure if they died back to the ground in drought but sprouted new growth after the rain returned, or if they had some sort of leaves all summer since I abandoned my garden.

I still have new lettuce plants sprouting occasionally in the tub in the greenhouse. All sorts of stuff continues to sprout in the yard and garden, which is pretty typical for a December this warm.