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I decided to try tomatoes again this year. Last year I grew them in pots, and they all got blight. Not suggesting that was cause and effect, but this year I planted them in the garden. I thought that waiting a week after the Victoria Day long weekend (May 21st) would be safe from frost.

Well, not this year. We had a bad frost Sunday night. Half the tomatoes are toast. Another frost forecast for tonight. I had them covered with straw on Sunday night, and I have covered them again tonight. That's about all I can do.

The local grape growers have lost about half their crop, too.

This planting out after all danger of frost - well the weather forecast never consults the growers about when it would be convenient to have the last frost.

The weather continues to baffle me.

We live on the Atlantic coast, so not much in the way of frosts really, but the winds are a problem, usually from the SW. This means our larger, front garden is virtually unusable for anything but grass and a few hardy shrubs (we keep trying different things but all have failed thus far).

However, one thing we have done with a glimmer of success is pot up all our fruit trees and move them round to the back of the house. Although on the NE of the building they get a good amount of the high, summer sun and many are setting fruit nicely, for the first time.

This spring the predominant wind seems to be from the east! The trees are blowing about like gooduns - fortunately it's not very strong so the fruit is holding for now!

And we've not had a drop of rain for weeks... From the bus to Dundee today, I saw several farmers irrigating tatties as well as neeps.

Today the M9 motorway came to a standstill because of giant hailstones!

Sorry, KL, didn't mean to steal your thread.

I lost some crops that I had planted out at the end of April.Was always told to wait until mid April when the last frosts had passed.I decided to wait until end of April,was then hit with a frost over 2 nights,probably lost a third of my plants.

Well, surprisingly, all the tomato plants recovered. This was due to my practice of NOT pinching off the suckers. I have learned in the past, from previous unseasonably late frosts, that the suckers are your insurance. So, although the early June frost killed all the leaves and branches of several of my tomato plants, the roots obviously survived, and the plants recovered by upgrading the suckers to full branch status. Several of the plants are now flowering.

The strawberry plants were in planters raised about 1 metre off the ground. The plants survived the frost, but a lot of the flower buds were damaged. We had a lot of aborted flowers and berries that stayed tiny and green. But a recent hot spell has perked them up, and they are flowering and setting fruit. We have picked six ripe strawberries! Woo-hoo! Party!! There are more berries to come, and the plants look much healthier than last year. Speaking of poop (the title of the thread), I dug in a bad of sheep manure in the spring, and it has made a big difference to the health of the plants.

We bought three grafted seedlings of Gravenstein apples, a local variety that is great for both cooking and eating. Two of the grafts took and the plants had quite a lot of leaves. So, last week, we planted the seedlings in the ground, on a day that was not too hot, not too cold, with a chance of showers. The next morning, every single leaf was gone!! Rabbits, we figured. There's not much we can do except (1) hope the rootstock is healthy enough to try leafing out again in spite of transplant shock or (2) buy new grafts and start again. In the hopes of trying option 1, I made some wire rabbit-proof cages to put around them.

Not likely rabbits Kath - they ususally take them off at stem first (45 degree cut) and then eat them.

Weedo wrote: ↑Sun Jul 08, 2018 10:56 pm Not likely rabbits Kath - they ususally take them off at stem first (45 degree cut) and then eat them.

Well, the stems are pretty woody. They nipped off the branches at their bases, ate most of the greenery, and left a couple of leaves on the ground. It didn't look like the work of slugs, our other garden nemesis.