Br-r-r!!

The great spring freeze has come and will soon give way to warmth. I covered all the baby plants, except for the two tree roses, in my newly-landscaped patio garden . The roses were up on the second level and I'm not able to step up that high. So they had to take their chances. With luck, I'll still get late blooms.
It's interesting to note how people who live in different climatic zones deal with plants in cold weather. The most unusual experience for me has to do with tomatoes. I grew up in Central Texas, where the growing season is long and tomatoes have plenty of time to mature. In that climate, we put our tomatoes out early, stake them and help them grow tall. We get more yield in a smaller space and keep the fruits off the ground. Soon after I moved to Wyoming and visited a friend's ranch, one of the first things I noticed was their tomato patch. At mid-summer, when the sun was high and the days were long, these gardners still allowed their tomatoes to lie on the ground in an unsightly, tangled sprawl. I almost said something about the value of staking when I noticed a large tarp lying all along the edge of the garden, looking for all the world as it it had been gathered back just that morning. As, indeed, it had. Each night, just before sundown, someone in the family took hold of either leading corner of the heavy canvas sheet and, together, they carefully dragged it over the tomatoes. I didn't know until that moment that it was likely to frost on any given late summer night in Wyoming. If you wanted to carry tomatoes on the vine until they ripened, you had to allow them to spawl so they could be protected each night and uncovered to the sun's warmth the next morning.
Not wanting such a large patch and not being around every night to cover my garden, I kept a small greenhouse instead and let my tomatoes plants grow quite mature before I ever planted them outside and, even then, sometimes in early July, we had to drape a sheet over the plants to protect them from a sudden snow. You really have to want home-grown tomatoes in Wyoming to make such an effort.
My tomato plants are still indoors, by a sunny window, so they're safe. As soon as the sun warms things up, I'll go check on everything else. I hope your plants fared well last night. Good luck with them and happy gardening.