Purdue Extension Service

Vanderburgh County, Indiana

Cold Weather Concerns, Upcoming Programs

By Larry Caplan, Extension Horticulture Educator, Vanderburgh County, IN

For the Evansville Courier and Press, 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 from your fruit trees with a sharp knife or a razor blade,. If the center of the fruit 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 of the fruit is green, then that fruit would have probably gone on to become mature. Don't cut a huge number of fruit, but try to take a representative sample, to get an idea of the percent damage.

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 that 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 them to be all destroyed.

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On Saturday, April 21, there will be an Earth Day celebration at Howell Wetland, on Tekoppel Avenue on Evansville's west side. Various environmental and educational organizations, including the Master Gardeners and the Wesselman Nature Society, will be on hand to run nature-themed games, crafts, displays and tours from 10:00 am till 2:00. Early bird visitors can go on bird-hikes at 8:00 and 9:00 am.

I will be holding a program on the Emerald Ash Borer at Wesselman Woods Nature Preserve on Sunday, April 29, at 2:00 pm. I will be teaching how to identify the pest and its damage, and what you can do to protect your trees.

For more information on cold injury or any of these programs, contact the Purdue Extension Service at (812) 435-5287.