Last fost...?

Determining the average last frost date for an area must be like reading tea leaves. If it were simple science, everyone would agree on the date. But instead, you are left with a range of dates and no real explanation for how any of them are arrived at. Besides that, no one seems to bother with calculating the date for places like Dale with a booming population of 500. But we do the best we can.

Using the Spring Equinox is kind of nice. It's a little later than the average of the average last frost dates! I've seen dates all the way from the end of February to the beginning of April. Last year, we did have a freeze on April 4 that was so hard it wiped out most of the tomatoes and potatoes even under row cover. Hopefully that won't happen again!

So with the freezing weather safely behind us (we hope!), we are getting the spring crops in. Dale has done a marvelous job tilling the open portion of the garden and turning that weedy area into prepared rows. Soon, we will have squash, peppers, beans and more growing everywhere!

With great enthusiasm, Mom bought us some tomatoes to get the season jump started. Many of our seedlings are stunted from the cold weather (we still haven't finished our hoop house!). So Dale planted them out this last week and they looked just marvelous. And then the weather report came in for Sunday night. Oh, it didn't sound so bad with a prediction of 38F. But we know that things are always different here in the Holler! We can expect the temperature to be as far off as 10F from the prediction (in either direction, but usually colder!). So an hour before dark last night, there was a frantic push to cover seedlings and the newly planted tomatoes. But the usual evening chores still needed to be done! So it was a race against time. Fortunately, we had enough folks to split the chores up and everything got done...and it didn't even freeze! Only 34F, but I'm sure the tomatoes didn't mind being tucked in anyways.

Soon...but not soon enough!