If that’s a question, the answer is YES. It can snow in June here in the Rockies. On Tuesday morning, June 9, we woke up to 2-4″ of soggy snow. It was pretty windy overnight so the snow drifted to make it hard to measure exactly how much. On the average I’d say there was a good 2″. The overnight low temperature was 29.5°, and was below 32° for about 5 hours.
What about the garden?
We are well prepared for almost anything, including snow and below-freezing temperatures. We’d seen the forecast, so planned ahead and covered everything as much as possible. Of course, our shadecloth protects not only against the intense sun, but keeps out hail, and in this case, snow.
The most temperate plants (squashes and their companion flowers, and bush beans) are covered each night with plastic over the hoop frames, but on this night we added an additional layer of frostcloth directly over the plants inside those hoops. We have been covering many of our plants with various plastic containers at night primarily to keep the mice out, but in this case they provided extra protection from the cold and snow. The potatoes and other beds with cold-sensitive plants were all covered with frostcloth underneath the shadecloth. Additionally the smallest, most immature plants that do not have plastic over the hoops had water bottles placed around them for added protection against the cold, with frostcloth layed over the top.
In the morning we removed the snow from the shadecloth & frostcloth and opened up the hoop tunnels. By the afternoon, just about all the snow had melted and it reached 53°.
Everything seems to have survived and is doing well!
