(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — Gardeners are eager to get things in the ground, but an expert from the Chicago Botanic Garden has some advice.
“Some of the plants I’m seeing for sale now, like tomatoes, aren’t going to like night temperatures in the upper 40s and 50s. It’s going to slow them down,” Tim Johnson, senior director of horticulture at the Chicago Botanic Garden, said.
“Some of our plants, we wait until the week before Memorial Day to really get going on a lot of our summer stuff because we’re wary of cold nights and cold days.”
Johnson says it’s almost a little late to plant some of the early-season peas.
“But I’d probably still go for it,” he advised. “Lettuce is good to go, for now. Soon it’s going to be too warm for it, anyway.”
He shares a cautionary tale about the year he put in a lot of coleus in late May.
“It happened to then be a week of cold, rainy weather, and a bunch of them rotted out,” he said.
The takeaway, he said, is it doesn’t take freezing conditions to ruin warm-loving plants.
Watch the forecast, he said, and don’t rely solely on old benchmarks such as it’s safe to plant a garden after Mother’s Day.
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