After our garden was saved Thursday night because the unexpected lingering cloud cover kept it from getting as cold as forecast (32 instead of 28), last night was just the opposite (30 instead of 35). All the 'sensitives' are shot; even the potatoes, which were dying down anyway, couldn't take it.
Our Russet Burbanks gave us 50 pounds; but the ones in the ground out-produced the ones in the tires nearly 3:1!* At that rate, we would have had about 75 pounds. These are also the BIGGEST spuds we've ever grown. Naturally, they aren't ALL that big, but (only a handful of puny ones) a good percentage are jumbo sized. We're also getting a good crop of the German Butterballs, with as much as 5 pounds from a single plant.
We got a handful of small sweet potatoes, and I will plant them again, as this was a horrible year to grow anything that needed even a modicum of warm weather. Not a single tomato ripened. The speckled butter beans are deceptively hardy, so I'll at least get my seed back from them. We will have an abundance of corn, both regular and Indian.
We had close to 2" of snowfall late Wednesday afternoon into Thursday night, though only a trace actually stuck, and was gone before noon Friday: earliest measurable snowfall since the 1880s; tied for third or fourth earliest freeze on record.
The rye is a Medusa: cut off a head, and 7 more appear. Close to 250-260 pounds, once the gleaning was finished; close to 70 pounds of wheat. The wheat is more difficult to thresh, as it has thicker, stiffer, more brittle cores to the heads. The rye heads pretty much remain intact, spilling the seeds; the wheat heads break and interfere with dehulling, requiring a threshing, coarse winnowing, and then rethreshing to remove the hulls and final winnowing.
* The potato vines in the tires were taller, but less bushy, more spindly. They gave the same to slightly more tubers per plant, but much smaller, both on average and on maximum sizes, than the in-ground plants. Also, the Burbanks, in the tires, all produced potatoes only at the bottom of the plant; they did not produce any side shoots into the upper straw layers. That was not my experience using tires in Southern California in the 1970s. Can't remember what variety I used back then, though it was russet type. Those put out stolens at each tire level; these didn't.