oops...

So yesterday I went out to the greenhouse to do my morning 'chores' and check on the temperature.  I have two milk house heaters that I use for supplemental heat.  My practice has been to run both heaters on really cold nights.  I have a timer set up to run one hour on/one hour off that I use on mildly cold nights with one of the heaters.  And for the in between nights I try to guess whether I will need one heater full time alone or one full time and the other on the timer.  There have been a couple nights where it hovered around freezing and I have not used any supplemental heat but this winter that has been pretty rare.

So, in the midst of a multi day stretch of below zero nights I went out yesterday to check on the greenhouse and discovered that I had neglected to plug in one of the heaters.  So on a night that I had intended to run both heaters full time as it was expected to be in the minus teens overnight I actually only ran one.

It was an not an experiment that I chose to run but I did discover some interesting data nevertheless.  Two of my tomatoes were looking pretty sad. 

Regular readers may remember that I started some tomatoes way too early inside to check the viability of the seed and decided to grow them and see if we could figure out a way to get a jump on the tomato season.   I discovered that the two tomatoes were the pastes.  The brandywine and the cherries were looking okay. 

The greens were looking okay and the soil was firm but not frozen solid.  Having several more below zero nights coming up I will have an opportunity to further evaluate the tomatoes and so last night I plugged in both heaters and hoped for the best. 

This is what I found this morning.

Three tomatoes still looking pretty good.  The brandywine is the one on the right and the two cherries are left and center.  The tub behind holds kale and the tub on the floor holds vitamin green.