Hold Off On Planting Flowers In Lawton, That Last Freeze Isn’t For A While
How many times have you been so excited for the warm spring temperatures that you jumped the gun on those good outdoor sales and planted your flower beds just in time for Mother Nature to put a good freeze across the region and kill all of your hard work? It's a total bummer.
While Southwest Oklahoma is far more famous for crazy severe weather... with the humongous hail, incredibly high winds, and legendary twisters... it's the lowly late-freeze that sweeps in like a sleeper late in the year.
It's especially a downer since all the big-box retailers get their garden centers going about now. By the end of Spring Break, your perfect garden will be available at every home center in Lawton... but it's a trap.
Historically, the last freeze happens in Lawton through the first week of April and sometimes as late as the third week of April. We've even experienced a hard freeze in the middle of May before, but that's incredibly rare.
While the threat of a freeze is generally gone by the last week of April, there still remains a chance of frost for another week or two until those cold fronts warm up around the arctic... but the risk of frost damage is only to the most sensitive plants... cheapy flowers or anything normally found in the tropics.
Instead, get your yard in order. Now is the time to be hitting the grass with some sort of pre-emergent. Have it sprayed or do it yourself. It's not hard as long as you remember to water it in. Go ahead and throw down your organic fertilizers. Try to give your grass the best head start you can now as it emerges from dormancy. Then when things heat up in May, you'll have a brilliant carpet of grass to complement whatever color you decide to plant in the beds.
Fair warning... Keep an eye on the weather when it comes to spring and clearance sales at the garden center. 99% of the time it's the damaged and dying plants that get marked down to sell. You'll wonder what you did wrong, if your soil is less than ideal, if plants just simply hate you, and quite frankly, you don't need that kind of negativity in your life.