The Tom Thumb popcorn could probably be harvested now, but I’m going to leave the stalks for as long as I can before we do that. Just to make sure the kernels get all the time possible to fully mature and dry out on the stalks. So far, the critters seem completely uninterested in both corn beds!
Today was not as hot as yesterday, but still quite warm, hitting 21C/68F while I was working outside. Which is good for the remaining beds that will not be harvested for some time, like the Red of Florence onions next to the popcorn, which still have a lot of growing to do.
A real surprise this morning was seeing a bright yellow flower in the squash patch! The yellow patty pan squash plant is still alive, in spite of all the frost damage, and one of the female flowers actually bloomed this morning. There are several more female flower buds, too, but there are no male flowers to pollinate, so nothing will come of it. The green patty pans have squash that were big enough to survive the frost, and they are getting bigger, too. Even on the green zucchini, we found one little zucchini that had gotten bigger and could be harvested!
Later in the day, I finally cleared the tiny raised bed in the old kitchen garden, which required snipping off the dried poppy pods that had grown through the wire cover. These self seeded poppies have openings in their tops, so when I put them upside down in the container, the seeds just poured out. It really shows how these self seed so readily. The Hungarian Blue poppy pods do not have these openings, so are less likely to self seed.
Another surprise is seeing flowers on one of the volunteer tomatoes that got transplanted! They’re still so tiny, but they seem to really like where they were transplanted to.
I was going to plant garlic in the bed by the chain link fence, after it was reworked, but the garlic came in yesterday. The Jebousek lettuce is blooming now and I want to save the seeds, so the garlic had to go somewhere else.
Which is what my next post will be about!
I’m just loving that we’re past the middle of September, and there’s still gardening happening!
It’s always interesting to go through the garden after the first frost of the season, and see what survived and what didn’t. I’m rather used to finding things that end up dead after a few days, but it’s a real boost to my day when I find things that not only survived, but continue to grow!
The first photo is of the Ozark Nest Egg gourd, near the compost pile. All the volunteer squash in the compost pile were frost killed, and it looks like this little thing was, too, yet here it is, blooming!
The second photo is the yellow patty pan squash. There were some developing squash that were killed by the frost, but now I see that lower down the stem, there are both male and female flowers growing! I am not cutting back any of the frost killed leaves, since clearly they provided enough protection to keep the plant alive. In fact, I’m not pulling or cutting back any of the squash plants. Not even the winter squash. There’s no rush to do it, but who knows how many others are like this.
The last photo was a real surprise to see. The second light frost did damage the luffa leaves more, but they are still alive. What I did not expect, however, was to see fresh vines climbing the lilac, and new female flowers! I don’t see any male flower buds anywhere, but they might just be hidden among the lilac leaves.
The last couple of days has seen rain, off and on, especially overnight. Just enough that I’m not getting out there to do work that involves things like the electric chainsaw. We’re supposed to warm up again over the next few days, then get cool again.
I’m just going to post this photo for now; I took some video and will upload that later.
Until then, this is what I was able to harvest today.
We did get another frost last night. I was out doing my rounds early enough to see some frost still on the ground. Once again, there was no frost warning and, according to the official past 24 hours record, we never dipped below 6C/43F, while I know I saw 4C/39F on my app when I checked before heading out this morning.
I should get one of those high/low thermometers that have needles to mark the highest and lowest temperatures on the dial.
So for now, all the stuff affected by the frost has been harvested that could be harvested. I left the melons, because they look like enough of the vines survived for ripening to continue. We’re supposed to warm up over the next while, so that will give more time for things like the melons, peppers, Spoon tomatoes and the one eggplant to ripen. The other things, like the carrots and onions, can handle frost so they’ll be fine for quite a while longer.
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.
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.
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.
Last night was our average first frost night, and there was no frost. The garden survives another night!
Check it out. 😊
May the frost hold off at least as long as predicted. Cooler night means things are slowing down, so if we’re going to get to harvest things, we need as much time as possible for it to fully mature.
This morning, before I intended to continue working on the trellis bed, I wanted to transplant those volunteer tomatoes into the old kitchen garden.
Yes, it’s September, and our average first frost date is the day after tomorrow, but if the frost holds off long enough, they just might have a chance!
It was also a good time to amend the bed the Irish Cobbler potatoes were in. After removing the remaining mulch and loosening the soil (and finding a few tiny potatoes that got missed!), I worked in a bag of cow manure. I also noticed a couple of spaces in the walls where the grass clippings used as chinking was gone, so I found some scrap pieces of wood to put over the gaps on the inside.
Once the bed was prepared, I went and dug up the volunteer tomatoes. I don’t even water that bed anymore, so the soil was very dry. None of it stuck to the roots at all! I laid them out gently on one of the baking sheets we use to transfer seedlings in and out while hardening them off. Those are so handy! We need more of them, but Costco no longer carries them. They are SO much more expensive, elsewhere!
Anyhow.
I had seen one volunteer tomato had died; all it’s leaves just shriveled up for some reason. I left that one, but I still ended up digging out 9 tomato plants! All but one of them are where we’d had Spoon tomatoes planted, 2 years ago. I kept track of the one that came up where cherry and grape tomatoes were planted last year, and the year before.
I’d already given the bed a fairly decent watering, but once I knew how many transplants I had, I dug a hole for each of them, then gave each hole a deep watering. As for the transplants themselves, I trimmed off the lowest leaves and buried the bare stems all the way to the first set of leaves.
I happened to have exactly the right number of plastic rings that had been used to protect the peppers, etc. in the wattle weave bed, so those got put around each tomato plant. These will not only protect them from overnight chills, but from rambunctious kittens, too!
At this point, my alarm went off, reminding me that the post office was open again after lunch. I have a subscription on lysine for the outside cats, and it was in. When I got there, however, I had a pleasant surprise.
My saffron crocus bulbs were in! When I checked the tracking, it was telling me the package would arrive on Monday, so this was a pleasant surprise.
It also changed my plans for after I finished with the tomatoes.
Since we had to pull up all the Roma tomatoes, I had a lot of bamboo stakes available. I pushed in a pair of them inside each plastic ring. These will keep the wind from blowing them away – and the cats from knocking them about – and if the weather holds long enough for them to survive, they will be supports for the tomato plants, too.
I also had the soaker hose that had been used on the Roma tomato bed. It’s pretty long, though, so I was able to run it back and forth and around every plastic ring, using tent pegs to hold it in place on the curves.
Last of all, the mulch got returned.
It’s ridiculously late to be transplanting tomatoes in our area, but I wanted to give them a chance!
That done, I could move on to the saffron crocuses, which needed to be planted right away.
These are actually a zone 4 plant, and we’re zone 3, so they went into the same protected area we have our zone 4 apple tree, and where the girls planted tulips. This area has a mishmash of wire surrounding it, to protect them from the deer.
There are 20 bulbs in the package, and the need to be planted 4 to 8 inches deep, and 3 inches apart. I was originally intending to plant them in a 4 x 5 bulb block, in an area I was pretty sure there were no tulips growing, but after poking around with a garden fork, that went out the window pretty fast. The area is so full of large roots!
I ended up being able to start a longer trench, so I went with 2 rows of 10 bulbs, instead.
The instructions specifically said to NOT amend the soil with manure of fertilizer, to water them when planted, but to not water them again unless it was drought conditions.
In clearing out the soil, so many weed roots were removed that there was hardly any soil left. I would have to get soil from the remains of the truck load of garden soil in the outer yard we bought a couple of years ago.
After removing the top 4 inches of weed roots and dirt, I loosened the bottom with a cultivator tool, then gave the trench a very deep watering. Then I loosened the soil some more, tried to level it off a bit, and watered it some more!
After that, I went and sifted some garden soil into the wheel barrow to fill the trench, before getting the bulbs.
I did not expect them to be so…
…hairy.
The bulbs got laid out in two rows, 3 inches apart, then buried. I ended up needing to get a second small load of soil to cover them well. They got about 6 inches of soil, maybe a bit more, on top. It will, however settle over time. Compaction is another concern. I wanted to give them a final watering, but not with out a mulch, first!
Thankfully, we still have lots of grass clippings handy for mulch!
Once a thick layer was in place, I gave it another deep watering. I wanted that new soil, which was quite dry, to be moistened. The mulch is great for keeping the soil below moist, but if the clippings are very dry, they actually prevent moisture from getting through. The top will get wet, but the bottom – and the soil below – says dry. Kinda like how thatch works. So I made sure the mulch itself was very wet, all the way through, so that the water could moisten the soil, too.
Given the temperatures we can hit over the winter, these will need more protection before the ground freezes, as well the apple tree. It’s already sheltered and protected from the north and, now that the dead and dying trees are cut away, it gets full sunlight and warmth. Still, extra protection will be good! When the leaves fall, we can use that to mulch the entire area. In the spring, though, the mulch of the crocuses will need to be pushed aside, leaving only a light layer to protect the soil. The alternative would have been to plant them in pots and bring them in every winter, and frankly, I have no interest in doing that. It’s hard enough to protect our house plants from the cats! They’d just love some big pots of soil to dig in. 😄
Once the mulch was in place, I spread out the soil that had been removed as evenly as I could, and that was it.
We now have tomatoes transplanted that, if they survive, will be for this year, and bulbs planted for next year! These crocuses boom in the fall, so it will be quite some time before we know we will have any saffron to harvest.
Bulbs typically triple their flower output year over year. A package of 20 bulbs should produce enough saffron in the first season for the average family to enjoy sparingly.
Triple their output every year? That would be amazing!
While doing my morning rounds, I make a point of looking at the squash blossoms to see if any need to be hand pollinated. With the chilly nights we’ve been having – we dropped to 6C/43F last night – I’ve been finding bees in the flowers, curled up and covered in pollen.
We’ve got so many tomatoes inside already, waiting to be processed, and I still have the unripe Romas sitting on screens under the market tent, until we have room to move them indoors, but when they’re ripe, they’re ripe. They need to be picked!
Then there was just one, lonely zucchini. 😁 Which I’m quite happy with, since we almost had no surviving zucchini at all, this year!
With the overnight temperatures dropping lower than forecast, I find myself wondering if we should gather all the tomatoes and bring them in to ripen. We’ve got a couple of nights coming up that are now predicted to drop to 6C/43F overnight. Considering that we’ve been hitting that on nights we were supposed to drop to only 10C, it has me concerned. Sunday is the 10th – our first average frost date. We’re supposed to have a high of 18C/64F that day, and an overnight low of 6C/43F. The next day is supposed to have a high of 17C/63F, with no change in the low. After that, things are supposed to warm up again. Depending on how the forecasts change, we might be trying to cover the tomatoes, peppers and melons. There’s no way we can cover the squash bed. It’s just too spread out.
So many things depend on the weather right now. For things like the winter squash, peppers – only the Sweet Chocolates are far enough along to have ripe ones to pick – and our one eggplant that’s trying to grow fruit right now, a frost would mean no harvest at all. The carrots, onions and purple potatoes would be fine, at least.
Well, we shall see when the time comes. Just praying for the frost to hold off long enough for things to finish ripening, though even chilly nights will slow things down.
I know the bees would sure enjoy the warmth hanging around longer!
While checking on the garden yesterday evening, I noticed some of the melons were getting pretty heavy, so I dug out something I’d made the first year we tried to grow melons, and succeeded. This morning, I got some photos.
I might have to make more. There are quite a lot of melons getting nice and big in the makeshift trellis!
I look forward to when we have permanent and portable trellises. I am really happy with how some of our climbing vines have been doing. Especially the melons in their kiddie pool raised bed! There are three varieties in there, but they are all climbing so vigorously, the vines are all twisted around each other. We’ll figure out which is which, when it’s time to harvest them.
The Re-Farmer 