Frost Makes Gardening Tough

I can't believe it. This weather is absolutely crazy. Here it is the 5th of June and we've had frost over the past couple of nights and have been covering like crazy.

What really bugs us is that we had the garden in and planted back on May 14 and it was coming along pretty well. It's been dry but we've been helping it with daily hand waterings so that's kept it growing. Our tomatoes were getting blossoms, the onions were about 6 inches up and we were looking forward to chopping them into salads. (We will cause they are tough and OK but back to the rest of the story).

Our garden is about 30 x 80 feet and filled with a combination of vegetables including potatoes, corn, peas, carrots, beans, beets, lettuce, zucchini and of course onions. We've also planted some pumpkins for the grand kids and we've even got some watermelon plants coming up. With all this going on you can imagine my the panic the Missus was in when the weather forecaster mentioned frost for Saturday, May 28. We bustled about the garden with all manor of pots, blankets, tarps, cardboard boxes, pails, tubs and even tipped the wheelbarrow upside down to cover momma's precious garden.

The yard looked like someone had dumped their junk off but it worked. We had two degrees of frost that night and we were dang glad we had it covered. Trouble is I think we started a trend. Now the garden seems to want to be covered up every night. Next it'll be wanting bed time stories. Oh, a couple of things got touched but at least we haven't lost anything --- yet.  We'll its starting to warm up outside so we're heading out to roll back the covers and see how things survived. Oh, it only went down to 2 C last night. We've also found some great little tarps at Princess Auto that were designed for wood piles but work perfectly for garden rows. They are 3.5 feet wide and 17.5 feet long. The price was very reasonable at $3.49 each so we bought several. To protect the plants a bit we elevated them on some old plastic starter trays we had in the greenhouse (its just hobby size nothing elaborate). I considered myself fortunate to get to go into Princess Auto cause usually the Missus has me banned cause they have too many things I need. LOL

Oh, I've also got some grape vines going so come back later and I'll tell you how I've got them protected.