When I woke this morning and checked my weather app, just before it refreshed itself, I saw something I did not want to see!
2C/36F
Considering the time of that reading, it was entirely possible we had frost last night.
We had no frost warnings at all before I went to bed.
Not that we could have done much about it. All those support poles and trellises are great, but make it impossible to cover the plants. At least not with the material we have. The squash patch is just too big.
When I first started my rounds after feeding the outside cats (I tried for a head count and saw 26 or 27. I may have double counted one) and headed towards the gate cam, I was somewhat encouraged. Usually, even if we have a light frost, I would still see signs of it in the shaded areas along the driveway long after it melted elsewhere. I saw only dew.
Then I started checking the south garden beds. Everything looked fine as I made my way through. Even the Little Finger eggplant in the concrete blocks, and the Caveman’s Club gourd, seemed unchanged.
Then I saw the squash growing in the compost pile.
All the leaves were drooping.
Still, this area is a lot more shaded than others, especially in the mornings. The nearby beds of onions, carrots and the popcorn cobs drying on their stalks are frost hardy, so they were fine.
Going to the sign cam, I pass the Crespo squash patch. That spot doesn’t get shade until the sun is at its lowest in the winter, so even this time of year it gets the full morning sun.
The leaves were all drooping, and I think I might even have seen the remains of frost glittering on some stems. It’s done.
When I got to the main garden area, I was a bit more encouraged. The plants supported on trellises seemed to fair better. The melons did show some cold damage in areas, while others looked just fine. Even the tomato plants seemed mostly all right. Much to my surprise, all the pepper plants in their grow bags looked absolutely fine!
The squash patch, unfortunately, was completely done in. Half the patch gets more shade than the other. In the heat of the summer, the plants that got more shade were doing better than the ones that got more sun but, right now, it’s the rows that get more sun that are looking less damaged than the others.
I’ll leave them alone for now, and see what happens over the next couple of days.
The old kitchen garden, much to my surprise, was fine. Even the luffa! The peppers here also showed no signs of cold damage, the Classic eggplant and all the transplanted tomatoes in their plastic shields seem completely unaffected. Even the Spoon tomatoes looked undamaged, and I was able to pick a bunch of them.
What’s frustrating is that there were NO frost warnings. I found a site that gives temperatures for the past 24 hours, and I did find it dipped to -2C/28F at around 6am – in the city! When I did a search for our area, plus the areas north and east of us, where I know there are weather stations, the lowest recorded temperature was 5C/41F Yet, my own app showed we were at 4C/40F at a time when the past weather chart was showing 7C/45F.
Today, we’re looking at a high of 17C/63F, with an overnight low of 6C/43F Those overnight lows have been consistently wrong on the high side. Which means that we’re not getting any of the frost warnings that would normally be set off, once the temperatures are expected to drop low enough, even as the real temperatures drop below that warning threshold.
Again, there’s not much we could have done, but we would have at least picked all the remaining tomatoes and brought them inside. Including the mostly green tomatoes still out on screens under the market tent.
As things warm up today, I’ll head back out and reassess the damage.
I’m not sure what to do about the winter squash. All those big, beautiful Pink Banana and candy roasters! They are not fully ripe, but if we leave them out and the vines die back, will they continue to ripen? We certainly won’t be able to store them for the winter, but I don’t even know how edible they are at this stage.
Well, I just found the answer to my own question.
So, in theory, we can bring them inside and lay them out to continue to ripen. Since they won’t store for the winter at this stage, we could cook them and freeze them, instead.
I don’t think that will work with the melons as well, but those plants might survive.
Unless we get another frost with no warning again.
We really need a polytunnel.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 