Frost.
3a Temp: 31 degrees
6a Temp: 35 degrees
This weekend at the farmer’s market, Sally and I spoke to Cheryl Rogowski of Rogowski Farms at her organic vegetable stand. We sometimes sell our excess vegetables to her for members of her CSA.
Cheryl has about 120 acres of organic vegetables under production, and knows farming. She told us that Monday would possibly be frost, which was the first I had heard of it (and I pay attention to these things, there was no suggestion of this in the week previous, so we put the garden in a week prior to Memorial Day, generally considered “safe”).
Deb Zimmerman came by yesterday evening (thank you Deb!) to help cover things up. We left a few things uncovered, but put containers over most of the tomatoes, and row cover over the basil, beets, chard, and one row of tomatoes - I really didn’t think we’d get frost.
This was the scene this morning at the farm at 6a. I was running back and forth to the garden, splashing water on as many plants as I could. Years ago, I read in “Little House on the Prairie” about Pa getting everyone up at 4a to splash water on the corn that had frozen (I am not making this up), which was supposed to be the only way to save it. So there I was…splashing water on the few uncovered tomato plants, on the pepper plants, the peas, brussels sprouts, verbena (pictured)…
We lost between 1/3 and half our tomato plants, and our six pepper plants, including four from seeds I brought over from a farm in Italy. The water didn’t seem to help those plants, but watering the verbena probably saved it. Most everything else in the garden can stand a spring frost, and an hour after the sun was up, the garden looked great…except for the wilting tomato plants that I and others had spent the last two months nursing to prime health.
The joys of farming. I can’t imagine getting this wrong with an entire field of tomatoes (we only have 125 plants this year - I can probably put in seeds this week directly in the ground and just get a delayed crop on most of the plants).
