News events that affect your Middle Tennessee landscape
Cold snap harmed some plants, but hold off on pruning
By Larry Caplan
Sunday, April 15, 2007
The severe cold weather we had during the weekend of April 13 (Easter weekend) did a number on our landscape and crop plants.
As I write this, it's still too early to tell what the long-term damage will be. I urge all gardeners to give your landscape plants time to recover on their own before you start drastically pruning plants back.
To check to see if your fruit crop survived, carefully cut open the tiny fruit with a sharp knife or a razor blade.
If the center has black spots, especially where the seeds should be, that fruit has been essentially killed by the cold and will likely drop within the next few weeks.
If the inside is green, then that fruit would have probably gone on to become mature.
Don't cut a large number of fruit, but try to take a representative sample to get an idea of the percent damaged.
By now, if the vegetables and flowers you planted in March are still wilted and limp, with no signs of new growth coming on, you may want to restart with new transplants. Avoid buying plants with dead, collapsed spots on the leaves or with water-soaked blisters; these are plants that received frost damage.
The cold weather probably did not affect any insect populations. Certainly, Japanese beetles and grubs were protected by the excellent insulating qualities of the soil. Bagworms, scale and warm-season mites are still in the egg stage and were probably not affected in the least.
The only good thing I can think of that happened is that some of the flowers of sweet gum were damaged by the cold. I think we might see fewer gumballs this year, but we weren't lucky enough for all of them to be destroyed.
Copyright© Evansville Courier Press, 2007