And Then .... You are Back at Square One!

This camper is mostly a happy camper, but today I am not! So what happened .... I have been raising my own plants since the beginning of March. First of March I put in a bunch of tomatoes, peppers and the likes. A month later I put in my cucumbers, melons and zuchini's and the plants were doing great. I was very pleased with myself that I had managed to have them grow into sturdy plants and not into spindly skinny plants which I had done before. Last week I put in the last batch of seeds which would consist of cabbages, marigolds and some other flowers. I already transplanted my tomatoes and cucumbers into larger pots and put them on my kitchen counter. They were already getting to a substantial size like 20 cm on average and were taking up quite a bit of space on my counter. Since spring seemed to be finally getting a hold on things I checked the weather forecast and saw that there was no frost in the forecast for at least the next 10 days. Day temperature would be a balmy 15-20 degrees, so great temperatures for putting my plants into the greenhouse. Here they would be sheltered from the winds and the nighttime temperature would probably be a degree or two warmer than the outside. I was pretty excited to take the plants to the next step and put them all in my greenhouse yesterday.

And then the night happened and I woke up to a beautiful sunny spring day. But when I went to check up on my plants the sad story revealed itself to me. Most of my plants had frozen. Only miserable stalks with wilted leaves were what I found. All tomatoes except for one, all cucumbers except for one, all melons except for one had succumbed in the night. My peppers had mostly made it by some miracle and from the flowers some seem to be affected but might make it but the rest is gone!!! When checking last nights actual weather, it apparently froze 3 degrees around 5 in the morning. That wasn't predicted!

So now I am back at square one. Will have to start from scratch. Had seeded some different varieties of all my plants and was pretty excited about all of it. Luckily we have a lot of sunshine here in Alberta and plants can really grow fast. And if we are lucky and getting a nice fall than not all will be lost. So chin up and back to the drawing board.

So lessons learned:

- Do not trust the weather report and built in a few degrees of cushion in the decision making;

- Do not put all plants outside in one go, but do it in batches. If things go wrong you still have some spares.

- Cover plants up at night till at least till the nighttime temperatures are around 5 degrees.

- Keep your excitement in check because it can make you do silly things!