The Frost Cometh

Well, it's our turn to have our first frost tonight. The nice piece of trivia about having a frost tonight is October 31st is our first average frost date. This year, we are hitting it right on the nose.

We have had a faucet trying to leak on the north side of the house for some time now. Yesterday it decided to become a small, constant little stream. So, this afternoon, Frank replaced it. I thought it would be more difficult and take more time than it did. Having a husband that is able to fix just about anything is a blessing indeed. 

Since the frost is coming tonight, I picked the last of the peppers and tomatoes this afternoon. It' kind of sad it's going to frost because the okra, tomatoes, peppers and purple hull peas are all just blooming away right now. We have had some warm days in the last couple of weeks and these plants just don't seem to be ready to shut down yet. I was surprised to find that even though the okra has been blooming, and still has a number of buds, I didn't find one pod of okra to pick this afternoon. It has been about a week since I picked the last few pods, so I expected to find some today. The only reason I can think of is that we have been having cool nights in the 50's for a while and okra does not like cool weather.

I am very curious to see how the turnips, kale, swiss chard, broccoli, carrots, mangel beets, brussel sprouts and potatoes do with this cold snap tonight. You can see from the weather forcast that we are not expecting anymore freezing weather very soon. I've read that the flavor of turnips actually improves with a frost, and the same is true for brussel sprouts. But I'm curious if the turnip leaves will die with the frost. If they do the chickens will miss them since I feed them the greens every morning.

The turnip patch

Kale, swiss chard, broccoli and one lonely cabbage

Carrots and Mangel beets

 

I know the potatoes will die back with the frost. Since I am not quite up to digging them up yet, and we have had some come up here and there from the ones we missed during the spring, we wanted a way to find them after the plants died back. Frank had a great recommendation. We have some of that bright orange spray paint that is used to mark the ground for construction sites and such. It worked great and made it easy to mark each plant. The potato plants haven't grown as big as I would like. They were very, very slow to

come up and get going. I can only speculate why. It was still pretty hot when I planted them, so I wondered if that affected their growth rate. After they finally came up and the weather cooled off, the growth rate increased quite a bit, but the resulting plants are about half the size of the springtime plants. I don't expect to have near the harvest we had in June, but I know the potatoes will keep better, stay crisper and be slower to sprout, so I can use some of them for seed potatoes come spring. That makes the effort to grow this second crop worthwhile.

Even though autumn has arrived, I look forward to being able to continue our harvest for a little longer. The more we can learn about extending our growing season, while we still have time to practice and it is not a life and death situation, the better we off we are in the long run. It also gives us the opportunity to increase our harvest, and have more food to eat. You just can't beat that.

Until next time - Fern

Final Harvest Meal

Well, the final harvest of the above ground vegetables has come and gone. We had our first frost on November 2nd. We harvested most of the vegetables a few days before and the last of the sweet potatoes on that day. The only thing left in the ground now are the red potatoes we planted to see if we could get a fall crop. They were bit back a little by the frost, but are still green and growing slowly for now.

We had a little bit of this and that, so I decided to make a meal of it. I brought in the first batch of sweet potatoes we dug and sorted out a few that were cracked to cook first. We don't usually add anything to our sweet potatoes, just peel, slice, cover with foil and bake.

We had just a handful of green beans, so I put them on with a dash of salt and a little bacon grease.
 

The first batch of lima beans we cooked up we did not enjoy. This is all I got from the last picking and this time I tried something different. This onion is sprouting and needed to be cooked. I had an abundance of peppers that needed to be eaten. 

And I had a little bacon in the frig. So it was time for another experimental meal. I fried the bacon then took it out of the skillet. Then I sauted the onion, lima beans and peppers with some salt and pepper. After a while I added the bacon and some soy sauce. It took longer for the beans to cook than I expected, so I put the lid on to let them steam a little.

It's rather eclectic, but here is our final harvest meal. The green beans were good. The sweet potatoes really didn't have much flavor at all and were rather disappointing. We hope the rest will taste better after they have had a while to develop more of their characteristic sugars. I read somewhere that sweet potatoes really aren't much good until they have been stored for a while. I tried to find that information again in one of my books, but haven't run across it again. The lima beans? Well, I will continue to go with my original assessment. Next year we will devote the time, space and effort into something that produces more and tastes better. Now who can I give those seeds to?

It is almost a relief to put the garden to rest for the winter. The days are now much shorter with the change in time and there is little daylight after coming home from work. We will be having one set of baby goats around Christmas time, so there will always be plenty to do. But for now, a little slower pace and time to get things organized and ready for winter is a welcome opportunity. There are some things we feel the need to complete and have ready for the coming months. What about you? Are you ready?

Until next time - Fern