When cold weather strikes!

Hello to all of you new gardeners out there! As we explained in our first blog post, Radfield Farms is all about learning to grow our garden as we go. Even though we have grown gardens before we are still novices. We figure others can learn from our successes and learning opportunities. It is very important to us here to be connected to our land and our food.

Now we have put in our early season crops here. These would include our broccoli, cabbage, spinach, onions (red, yellow, green) and early season garlic. March is the typical month to plant these vegetables since the danger of frost is normally gone and spring is beginning to show its beautiful face. So we felt pretty safe when we began planting a few weeks ago.

Now I am new to our region (Tulsa, Ok), I have only been here a year now. Last year I did a very small garden and began to learn about the soil here and how to work with it. We have a lot of rock and clay in our dirt. I am also learning how the seasons go here. Last year in March we got a freak snow storm that dropped about 6 inches of snow. This had been after a week of warm and sunny weather. I thought, what an odd thing to happen. No one told me that this was a normal thing every year for Tulsa.

So at the beginning of march we had planted our onions and broccoli and were excited to watch them grow big and strong. About two weeks after they were in the ground..... the snow hit. It was a bitter cold blizzard leaving 6 to 8 inches behind. I was at work when the snow began to fly and I quickly grabbed the phone and called Mike. I knew we would have to cover the plants in order to save them from the cold. Now these are crops that enjoy cooler weather, but this was a bit too cool. I remembered reading somewhere that you should cover them and try to dig down in the soil with the covering to encircle the roots as well.

When I called Mike I remembered we had some oversized beer mugs and asked him to use them to cover the broccoli, which thankfully was the only crop growing and not still a seed in the ground. He did just that, by the time I got home you couldn't even see the tops of the mugs. After a few days the snow melted. We took the mugs off right away and the broccoli had survived. They definitely looked beaten up but they were alive. A very important thing to remember is to remove the glass mugs right away when the sun begins to melt the snow, otherwise you can fry your precious plants.

It has been over a week now and the broccoli is doing fine and even has new growth. So the plan to cover the plants and surround the roots worked and I am very thankful I remembered reading that tip. The onions and garlic have even begun to peak out from the ground. So it was nice to have a success in a precarious situation and you can guarantee I'll remember this next year!

I will share a learning opportunity we had though. I found a beautiful Red Basil plant at our local green house. I got it home and was so excited to plant it so I didn't do any of our normal research and just put it in. The big storm killed the poor plant. I did some research and learned that basil likes warmer weather and does best in soil that is already around 60 degrees which means a later planting season. If I would have stopped and researched first we wouldn't have lost the basil. To say the least, I bought another and it is growing just fine in our sunroom until later this spring.

So I have learned to always stay up-to-date on the weather and to do my research before planting. I am glad that I get so excited about the plants we get, but I would rather them grow healthy. As always, learning as we grow......