-8 last night - who cares!

Being the maverick I am, a little cold snap wasn't about to deter me.......

It got up to 70f in the (unheated) greenhouse today :D

SO, I've defrosted my compost and sown even more onions and a few brassicas to boot.


I Love heated propagators

 

who cares? .... it means .....



for many expensive plants ...

but keeps guys like me in business as we have to remove the dead ones and replace with new :WINK1:

 

Vince, I care.:WINK1:

I too can maintain 70F plus in a heated propagator right now, but if I want to grow things on in the greenhouse at these kind of temperatures its going to cost crazy money these days.

I'm running a 750 watt tubular heater and a 2 kilowatt fan heater to maintain 4C in my greenhouse overnight.

I'm also burning a paraffin heater in the allotment greenhouse at £7.50 a gallon, where it was minus 6 with the heater on.

If the cold goes on much longer I'm really going to have to think about the cost.

 

Fingers crossed for this week Pete, the last frost (for now) forecast tonight and then the possibility of day time temps back in to double figures by Thursday....:yess:

 

:party::party::yess::yess::yess:

I still have Potato shoots:yess:

 

Double figures would be nice.
But not in any forecast I'm looking at.

 

I'm going to order my weather from this site:

10 day Weather in Redcar - weather.co.uk

The BBC's offering is not quite as nice:

BBC Weather : TS10

 

Met office forecast says 6° for Tuesday and 7°
for Wednesday for our district - no sign of double figures yet. :(

Roll on spring - but think it'll be a few weeks yet!



.

 

This is our local forecast; Wednesday and Friday looking good :WINK1:; just a slight worry in that there's a dreaded negative figure of -2 for Friday night at the moment :DOH:

Weather Forecast Long Eaton, United Kingdom | Long Eaton Weather | Wunderground

 

I wrap the propagators with bubble wrap which seems to help a lot but I'm sowing "small and often" so any losses (none yet) will be minimum. The cold snap has stunted the progress of my "unprotected" seedlings but they're still looking fit and healthy :D

On the plus side, I'm hoping the recent cold snap has had a beneficial effect on my fruit trees, as we know, they need a cold spell over winter to produce a good crop! maybe NOT long enough but the next month or two will tell?

 

you will not know what has been damaged until the end of April/mid May ....

things may look ok now, but after a few nights of -16 degrees C which some places in the UK recently had, ..... some of the tender plants will/may be 'toast'

 

My two Acacia Baileyanas are a grey/brown colour now due to the couple of -7/-9cs we had last week. If they don't recover I shan't grow them again and might give up with some exotics altogether.
I haven't started anything in my propagator yet as it will still be too cold in my heated greenhouse to grow them on.

 

Strongy, maybe you should just lower your expectations slightly due to your new location.
I'm pretty sure anything I can grow would do fine where you are, A baileyana has never really been an option for me, but A. pravissima appears to be hardier, and up until a couple of years ago A.dealbata grew quite large.
I've got an A.longifolia that looks OK after minus 8 time will tell on that one.