QuickTake:

If your garden vegetables are looking a little peaked after January's extended low temperatures, give them time and warmth. They’re likely to bounce back.

There are at least two kinds of cold snaps, and they can both mean trouble for plants in your garden.

We just had a long duration cold snap, and while the overnight low temperatures were mostly in the 20s, for most of a week, the temperatures stayed close to freezing all day.

That left winter vegetables and cover crops frozen for days at a time. And while fava beans, leeks, arugula and crimson clover are bouncing back, overwintering broccoli and cauliflower are springing back much more slowly. 

But don’t be too hasty about removing plants just because they look less than perky. Time will likely bring them back to health — along with the typically warmer temperatures we get in March.

When the temperatures reached 40 degrees, the fava bean plant staged a comeback. Credit: John Fischer

When I was on search and rescue, we had a grim saying: Nobody is dead until they are warm and dead.

That is also true for your plants. And it brings us to the other style of cold snap. When we get an arctic outbreak — where temperatures drop into the teens or single digits — both ornamental and edible plants can appear to be dead even as spring unfolds.

I had a fig tree that was kindling dry and lifeless two months into its normal growing season after our minus-10-degree lows in December 2013. While many people cut off the “dead” wood on yard plants and fruit trees, plants given time to prove they were dead generally came back to life if they were not prematurely cut down.

While we have had arctic cold snaps as late as mid-February, weather patterns right now point to no arctic outbreaks for at least two weeks. Our recent cold snap may have damaged a few sensitive plants, but ornamentals in your yard should be fine when spring — finally — comes.