Threat of frost teaches the same old lesson yet again

I wrote a story that's scheduled to be in Sunday's Chicago Tribune about why it's important not to plant tender vegetables such as tomatoes or tender herbs such as basil too soon.

Of course when I wrote it a couple weeks back, the temperature was close to 80. And over the next few days, as if I hadn't written it at all, I fell hard, just like an innocent brand-new gardener, for the tent in the Jewel parking lot and the Friends of the Oak Park Conservatory herb sale and a Home Depot garden department I just happened to walk through while buying light bulbs. (Yeah, sure.)

That's why I spent much of this afternoon hustling flats of impatiens and caladiums and pots of elephant ears and basil into the basement and the kitchen, because it's supposed to get down in the low 30s tonight.

I have already planted a bunch of herbs -- including basil I raised from seed -- in my kitchen-garden boxes. I hope they'll be OK; they're up on the third floor porch, probably safe from a ground frost. But maybe I'll just go out there and spread a sheet over them to be sure.

Of course, I didn't need to buy any plants this early. I have a grand plan that requires moving dozens of hardy perennials around. I have brush to bundle for pickup and shrubs to move. I have seeds to sow. I could have been busy for weeks without buying any impatiens or caladiums or tuberous begonias.

So why did I buy them, a good month too early, knowing perfectly well that it's way too soon to plant them, that the soil's still too cool, that I have no time to plant all this stuff anyway, and that we still have a good chance of frost in early May? Knowing, as I well do, that we have had frost on Memorial Day?

Same reason everybody does. Plants cheered me up on a blue day. I wanted spring to happen faster. It was the usual magical thinking: I can make it be time to plant by shopping as if it's time to plant.

Retailers know all about this kind of magical thinking and they know that we gardeners are the worst kind of impulse shoppers. That's why they start selling tomato plants to spring-crazed Chicagoans in April. When those plants get killed by frost or rot out from being planted in cold soil, they know, we'll just have to come back and buy more.

Fortunately, I'm raising my own tomato plants and I wasn't dumb enough to set those out. They will stay safely beneath lights slung under a card table in the guest room until the last week of May or the first week of June.

I would say I hope that this teaches me a lesson, and that next year I'll have more sense. But Chicago weather has taught this lesson year after year, and regardless of what I write, I never really seem to learn.

At least the thunderstorm that swept in this cold front has brought us some rain.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

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