This may be the most frustrating time of the year for vegetable gardeners. When temperatures spike into the 70s and the sun begins to feel warm on your face, it seems like time to be working in the garden.

Even more enticing is the smell of rained-on soil after a spring shower. It’s almost as if these changes in weather flip a toggle in the brain, switching us into gardening mode.

These can be perilous times for vegetable gardeners, though. Anyone who has ever planted a crop too early or moved transplants outdoors to a cold frame, only to have a late freeze foil their efforts, knows what I’m talking about.

Recent overnight temperatures that dipped into the 20s and high teens should serve as a warning. Our fruit trees already had buds on them and we’re waiting to see whether we’ve lost our cherries and peaches for the season.

Just because you can work in the garden in a T-shirt during the day doesn’t mean gardening season is officially here.

Certainly, we can begin planting greens, cole crops, potatoes, onions and other early-season veggies well before the average date of the last killing frost, which in this region is April 20. But trying to urge the calendar forward can be a fool’s errand.

When the gardening bug first really hit me, I was obsessed with the idea of extending the season. I felt certain that I should be able to plant tomatoes in early April, at the latest, if only I could offer them sufficient protection from the elements. I invested a small fortune in row covers, cloches and Wall-o-Waters, those water-filled cones that were supposed to perform gardening miracles by surrounding your tender vegetable plants with warmth and protecting them from frost.

I found a Wall-o-Water under a bush a few months ago, which sort of sums up my experience with them. They sprang leaks and when one of the baffles no longer held water, the entire contraption would buckle. You could patch the leaks, but it was about as productive as trying to keep a cheap air mattress afloat. If all the water drained out while it was crumpled on the ground, a good, stiff wind could blow it away.

The other problem was that as the temperature inside the cone rose, dew formed and often produced mold. The tomato plants I transplanted into these things were spindly and often never overcame the trauma of being cooped up in those conditions during the beginning of their life outdoors.

I suspect my experience was not unique, because many of these contraptions no longer take up as much space in garden supply catalogs. In fact, several years ago I phoned Joe Thomasson, a botanist at Fort Hays State University, whose book “Growing Vegetables in the Great Plains” gave me the idea to use Wall-o-Waters. I called him with a question about something else but we got off on the topic of Wall-o-Waters and it was clear that his enthusiasm for them had cooled since his book was published in 1991.

After my failure to produce vine-ripened tomatoes by June, I finally resigned myself to cooperating with Mother Nature rather than trying to outwit her. Instead, I started to pay attention to the way weather affects different parts of my gardens.

For example, the bed where I grow my herbs is just below the crest of a slope and for whatever reason frost and hard freezes don’t register as severely there. That’s information I can use. I also have become keenly aware of how wind affects vegetables that grow in unsheltered places and how corn and tomatoes provide shade, needed or not, for other plants.

The trick, I have decided, is to work with the weather and the garden site rather than trying to make them be something they’re not.