With temperatures expected to drop again Monday night, experts are warning gardeners to take precautions.
“What I'm seeing is a lot of dead, unfortunately," says Jay Terryberry, professor of landscaping horticulture at St.Clair College.
Plants inside his garden centre were protected overnight Sunday with many of them covered in plastic, but the damage is still widespread. Terryberry thinks many others are seeing the same.
“Take a look to see if plants have water soaked appearance,” he says. “You'll be able to see if plants are wilted. You should see damage quite easily.”
He says plants that are already in the ground should be protected. They can be covered in burlap and plastic. He also recommends waiting until the weather warms up before planting.
Meanwhile, Murray McLeod of McLeod Farms near Cottam, was up all Sunday night tending to his delicate strawberry plants.
“These plants are full of yellow flowers and that's what it’s all about,” says McLeod. “If I wasn’t out here spraying, these flowers would have died and I wouldn’t have had strawberries out of this field."
When the temperature dropped at midnight, McLeod turned on his irrigation pipes to protect two acres of flowering plants.
“It looks like we've got a good crop out of this field and we would have lost 75 per cent of them,” says McLeod.
