Waco, TX (FOX 44) — As severe weather moves out of Central Texas, we will see a drop in temperature, and gardeners who planted early face the risk of losing them.

Gardening experts say the drop in temperature can damage your plants, and the best thing you can do is to cover them with an insulated blanket.

“You might wake up in the morning and see your plants wilted over to prepare for that [cold weather],” Westview Nursery and Landscape salesman Cole Tucker said. “We typically tell everybody to water real good the night before a freeze or any kind of cold snap. That’ll actually help insulate the roots.”

Tucker says you can also add a two inch layer of mulch over the plants for additional protection.

He adds the warm weather is causing customers to have early spring fever.

“They’re getting vegetables, they’re getting the perennials, they’re getting the annual color, so everybody’s ready for it,” Tucker said.

They’ve all be coming in buying their tomato plants, and their peas, their tender perennials, and their little annuals. They’ve been buying those already,” Greenlife Nursery vice president Debby Boyd said.

Boyd says your plants can experience a light freeze once the weather reaches 32 degrees.

It becomes a hard freeze at 28.

“Hard freeze can do really a lot of damage to a plant, especially if you don’t cover up those tomatoes, peas, or corn or spinach that you have already planted in the garden, or the marigolds and the petunias they can really do a hard damage to,” Boyd said.

Boyd says to not use sheets, bedspreads, or burlap to cover your plants.

What will happen is it will absorb a lot of moisture and it can get really heavy, especially if we have a hard freeze.

Both Boyd and Tucker say to cover your plants at all costs.

The rain can even beat down on plants.

“Think of your petunias with a real big bloom on it. A heavy rain with big droplets can beat them up, knock those blooms off, and then there you are with just green plant until that bloom comes back out,” Tucker said.

For anyone who has a plant still potted, Tucker says to wait for warmer weather before putting them in the ground.