Me: “It’s gonna rain, I’m going to get these tomatoes in the ground.”
Mar: “It’s supposed to get pretty cold on Thursday night. Why don’t you wait?”
Me: “NOAA says it’ll be 40, it’s gonna rain, so I’m going to get these in the ground.”
Mar: “What’s your hurry? You always wait til the end of May. It might frost and kill off the plants.”
Me: “It is the last week of May. I doubt it’ll frost. It’s gonna rain, so I’m going to get these in the ground.”
Mar: “Well, OKAY…”
Flash forward to Friday. Dead plants all over the place!
And…NO RAIN! All the signs pointed to ‘This is not a good idea, Ryan.’ from multiple conversations to NOAA dropping a forecasted temp to Maree trying to talk me out of it.
Persistence can be my virtue, but persistence also makes a person hold onto an idea a little too tightly, push through no matter what. In this case, my let’s-charge-forward attitude got me. The absolute lack of rain so far this season certainly had an impact on my decision-making. A 50% chance of rain just sounded so good that I could just not let it go by. The weather gods were tempting me.
Moral of the story – I should have listened to my wife. I know that makes all wives reading this smile a little as I’m sure you’ve all had moments when ‘If he only listened to me..’ My neglect to do so in this instance caused me to flush a good $1,500 in transplants down the toilet.
Yes, there is a lot of season left and I’d like to thank Sheila Capistran from Ada Tomato for setting me up with a couple hundred plants yesterday to salvage a tomato planting. Still, this does set us back. Not just in tomatoes, but also the first planting of cucumbers and summer squash as well. Much tougher crops went through the cold no problem.
Lida Farm 