A week or so ago, I put out a few tomato plants - seedlings that I started months ago inside the house. The plants looked nice and healthy. They weren’t huge, but they looked good all the same.
The next few days, the night time temperatures dropped to the 40s. I tried putting plastic covers over the tomato plants, but to no avail. Now they are drooping, the leaves are covered in translucent white patches, and they look terrible. I am sure they have died.
Luckily I have many more seedlings that I can replace them with. I guess I’ll wait until the night time temperatures are warmer. I was told the 21st of May is a safe date for my area (S. Indiana.)
Aw, that sucks. I narrowly avoided the same fate - I was just about to plant mine outside, but put it off due to some other things that came up, and then we had a frost a few nights ago that I’m sure would have killed them. I planted them out yesterday and am hoping they make it. I still haven’t planted the bell peppers, though.
That does suck and I understand. We had a pretty good size garden wash away last week and now the garden section of our back yard is flooded along with many parts of Memphis.
We did have some seedlings started under the carport though so we haven’t given up yet.
I got a couple of tiny tomato plants about a month ago, kept them inside until they were pretty big, then recently I planted them into larger pots. They don’t have to go straight in the ground, you know - when there is still a risk of frost (like there is here), you can just move them back in the house.
It’s still around 80 degrees here during the day even though it is autumn. I have come to the conclusion it is a waste for me to grow tomatoes. There are too many bugs unless I really soak them in chemicals.
They can handle short excursions down to about 40 or so without problems, as long as the temp warms back up fairly quickly.
We had a cold snap (for May anyway) here early last week, and it got to 39 one night, with no visible damage to my tomato, pepper, bean and cucumber plants.
Bummer. Around here there is no point putting out the tomatoes until Memorial Day…there is sure to be bad weather between now and then. Memorial Day weekend is a gardening weekend for me.
I can’t believe other places are still getting freezes - today the air is broken at work and we’re melting into little sweaty puddles. I mean, intellectually I know it’s the case, but deep down I just don’t believe it.
When in the Fall does it get too cold? If late-May is the earliest you can plant, you probably have a race between having 90 day veggies ripen vs. die on the plant because it’s too cold.
I had the opposite problem with my strawberries. The temperature was up in the 90’s here and all my little budding strawberries withered.
I sympathize with you on the tomatoes. Though we don’t have problems with cold temps here, I’ve grown tomatoes before and they are some of the most disease and pest-prone plants ever. You end up with a big harvest per plant, but they are difficult to keep alive.
Tomatoes can handle sub-50F temperatures just fine. I have some that just came out of a coldframe where it has gotten to 40F or so a few times in the past couple of weeks, and they are doing well. Mature tomato plants survive and continue producing right up until frost.
Problems arise when young plants are not hardened off properly and go from warm, not too bright conditions indoors to an outdoor location where there’s sun, wind and a plunge in nighttime temps. Plants can wind up shocked if not killed.
If there’s no coldframe or other protection available in spring, young plants need to be exposed to outdoor conditions for no more than a couple hours a day at first, and gradually given more sun and exposed to cooler temperatures than they were used to indoors.
I gather you’re living in a hot-climate area, where tomato pest and disease problems are magnified. In more temperate zones they’re one of the easier vegetables to grow.
In my coldframe, when it got down to 40 I had some frost damage. What was interesting is that the most damaged plants were all one variety, my other 3 varieties survived quite well. Never having done tomatoes from seed, or used a coldframe before, I didn’t expect that.
I planted mine this past weekend, technically next week is my “safe” date, but the weather looked pretty good, so I went for it.
