When I was doing my morning rounds, everything was still covered in frost, as we dropped below freezing last night.
I noticed the cover on the winter squash, which I haven’t lifted for awhile now, looked rather different.
Yes, there was frost on the cover but, if you look at the next photo in the slide show above, much of that frost was coating the inside of the cover!
I waited until things warmed up after I’d run my errands today before taking the cover off to see. In the third photo, you can see that all the plants were killed by frost. The next few photos are of the winter squash that seemed to have survived the cold. Two Baked Potato and three Mashed Potato squash made up the littler harvest you can see in the last photo of the slideshow above. The little ones should still be okay to eat. I am curious if the largest one has mature seeds inside. These are not varieties that produce large squash, so that one might actually be the full mature size.
That done, I then started working on gathering up all the hoops and stakes and netting and protective collars. The plastic cover that was over the winter squash got folded up length wise – it has a hole in it but, folded in half lengthwise, it should still be useable – a couple of times before getting rolled up.
Folding a very long, damp sheet of plastic took quite a while! Thankfully, there wasn’t much wind, but what little breeze there was sure didn’t help!
The trellis netting and the stakes holding them got taken down. Finding a way to store the netting, which has 4″ squares, without getting it all tangled took some doing.
For the past while, I’ve been putting the material together by the tree stump bench near the old garden shed. Aside from what is still covering the garlic, I think I’ve been able to gather everything from all the garden beds. I’d already partially sorted and bundled some of it. Today, I worked on finishing off the organizing, bundling and collecting it all.
The first photo above is how the garden looked, after I took all the stuff down. The garlic bed will be done after I’ve winter sown something with it, then give it a thick mulch of leaves. Until then, the cover is needed to protect the bed from cats wanting to use is as a litter box!
The next photo is all my bundles of stakes, hoops, the hoop nets I can still use, and even the twisted up wire hoops. I’ve got my soaker hoses all rolled up. The garden hoses will be done soon, too, but they are still being used. Ties, clips, short stakes to hold the Pexx hoops in place, and even the pieces of pool noodle used to go over the support posts that had twine threated through them, when used to hold netting over a bed to keep the cats out. I’m even hanging onto the water bottles that were set on the tops of stakes to rattle in the wind and hopefully startle deer away. I’ve got a bundle of 8 metal posts I found at the dollar store in there, too. Four of them had been used to support a trellis for the melons that they never grew big enough to grow up on. The other four were ones I found more recently and have not been used yet.
In the future, I intend to get more of the tallest, plain metal stakes, but I also really liked the taller tomato cage sets. The sets are three posts with connectors. The shorter ones came with two connectors per post, the taller ones with three connectors per post. The same connectors can fit both lengths of posts. I have two sets of the larger ones currently around the plum tree, supporting chicken wire, to keep the deer from eating it. I have shorter sets around the gooseberry bush and apple tree. I used several sets of the taller ones to make a deer barrier in front of the pea trellis. I can see being able to use them in a lot of other ways, too. They are surprisingly sturdy for a dollar store purchase, and I plan on getting more in the future.
The last picture has the collection of protective collars on t-posts, to keep them from blowing away. The round wire tomato cages that were used for the pepper and eggplant are all stacked up, with a large plastic bottle covering the sharp points. The water bottles used to help keep the frost at bay under covers are hanging off a smaller stake set into the wire cages to hold it up. The water bottles with their bottoms cut off that were used to deep water the summer squash are stored on there, too. There’s a couple or rolls of the black netting, plus a couple of roles of wire mesh, as well, plus the rest of the T-posts.
Now that I have all these sorted out, I need to figure out how to store them. Some can fit in the old garden shed, but the rolling garden seat needs to fit in there, too. I’ve got more stuff to store than last winter, plus there are the hoses and the garlic bed’s hoops and cover to add to the pile, and it won’t all fit in there. That shed is in serious need of replacing, too. Lots of rotten spots in the walls and roof that are slowly getting worse. In the last photo, you can see part of it. The door is a simple piece of plywood, and it’s comping apart in layers from weathering!
I’ll figure it out.
The next couple of days are supposed to be warmer. Friday is supposed to be the warmest day, but it’s also supposed to be raining off and on all day. If the long range forecast is at all accurate, aside from the one rainy day, we should have about a week and a half of decent, if chilly, weather to finish preparing garden beds and getting the winter sowing done. That’s the priority. After that, I can work on finishing the wall on that garden bed in the old kitchen garden that I’ve decided to do slightly differently. It would be nice to finally get that bed finished!! I can’t believe how long it’s been taking to get it done. That’s what happens when a job gets worked on piecemeal. 🫤
So while I didn’t get any progress on preparing beds for winter, I did actually get a lot done. By the time I was done with all the sorting and bundling for storage, it was getting pretty darn cold out there (we’d already passed our high of 8C/46F by the time I started). I’m hoping to get an earlier start tomorrow, partly because I have an afternoon telephone appointment with the sports injury clinic about my hip. Not only is it expected to be warmer tomorrow, but we’re supposed to stay at our high of 11C/51F for about 6 hours, rather than the eye blink of time we were at our high today! We’ll be dropping down to 8C/46F again by Saturday, then warming up a bit again. I will be delivering cats on Saturday, anyhow, so that works out!
All in all, I’d call it a productive day.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 