Been so busy with the domain move, but am finally catching up. Last week Wednesday it froze and we lost most okra in our 3 sisters bed and the eggplant and amaranth in the lower garden.

10/27/11: frozen okra and Mexican sunflowers

A few other plants also had some slight frost damage. It’s strange that it takes a while until you can see that plants froze. In the morning it looked like everything was ok.

Fortunately we’ve been covering one garden bed and our north raised bed with blankets. In the lower garden I covered our best tomato plants with straw.  But despite all these efforts, I doubt that we’ll get any tomatillos worth eating.  Next year they’ll be in the hoophouse since this is the 2nd year the growing season was just too short.

Quite a few more tomatoes ripened in the last week, but with the forecast for temps down to the mid twenties, I decided to harvest all the outdoor tomatoes today. I got over 6 lbs in the lower garden and over 5 lbs in our upper garden. I’m going to try fried green tomatoes.

The greenhouse is still going strong and I sure wish I could keep it above freezing through the winter. The tomatoes are still doing fantastic, but the Armenian cucumbers stopped flowering and growing a couple of weeks ago.

Last year we had the first hard frost in October, so it could have been worse. But in the 7 years I lived in LMC I had my tomatoes going till Thanksgiving. Hopefully this winter won’t be as cold as last year when it got down to 9 degrees over Thanksgiving and again in December and to 4 degrees in January.   We’re in Unit 7 at about 4000 ft.