SE Wisconsin (Zone 4/5) had our first freeze last night - I woke up to 29 degrees!
The best part? Our new furnace works like a charm!
Some things in the garden will survive this - Kale (of course!) and my remaining lone red cabbage, taters still underground and still-ripening Butternut squash.
Sunny, windy and chilly today. I’ll take it over the awful HEAT we’ve had all summer (with NO A/C!)
The Garden Song
Inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe and a piece of fertile ground
Inch by inch, row by row, someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below, ‘til the rain comes tumbling down
Pulling weeds and picking stones, man is made of dreams and bones
Feel the need to grow my own ‘cause the time is close at hand
Grain for grain, sun and rain, find my way in nature’s chain
Tune my body and my brain to the music of the land
Plant your rows straight and long, temper than with prayer and song
Mother Earth will make you strong if you give her love and care
Old crow watching hungrily, from his perch in yonder tree
In my garden I’m as free as that feathered thief up there
Inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe and a piece of fertile ground
Inch by inch, row by row, someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below, ‘til the rain comes tumbling down
Going to grow Buttercrunch lettuce and spinach hydroponically. Just getting supplies together. Pure Science. Should have lettuce in 30 days.
Will let you know in the spring.
With a light freeze for this morning, pulled everything last night.
A few good tomatoes and a whole bunch of small ones. They’ve still got to ripen so they’re on the table.
I got some good peppers (not too many other than small). They’re all green so most of them need to ripen on the table as well.
I’m gonna gut the tops off the small tomatoes that are red (and when the others go red) and freeze them. They’ll go into some chili at some point.
Well, we now have about a half of a 5 gallon bucket of waste, a small mixing bowl full of pits, and about 4 quarts of simmering peach pulp in the stock pot. We’ll finish jamming & canning it tomorrow.
Managed to save about half of the barely ripening peaches we picked last week, before the freeze (18F) & snow hit us. I was afraid we wouldn’t get any.
Unfortunately, they taste like the reason I don’t buy peaches at the store, which are also picked green: bland. Thinking about adding some crushed pineapple to it, to kick it up a notch.
Of the 3 dozen squash I planted this year, I only got 5 pumpkins. And 3 of them rotted almost immediately. Today I cooked the remaining 2. One was pretty bland, but the other had this remarkably sweet, fruity flavor. It didn’t have the hull-less seeds I’ve been selecting for, but the flavor was good enough I’m definitely spinning that off into its own variety!
(These are from one of my breeding projects, so every plant is a little different.)