Two Feet in the Dirt

With less than two weeks to go before Thanksgiving, it’s starting to both feel and look like fall in the garden. This past Friday, I finally made the call to pull out the pepper plants as temperatures were forecast to drop into the upper 20s for the weekend. Peppers and the plants they grow on cannot survive in freezing conditions, which cause their cells to burst. However, I was able to protect them from the earlier light frosts by keeping the plants shielded under a layer of floating row cover and adding on a heavy tarp on particularly cold nights. Both help keep the heat in, preventing the covered area from experiencing as severe a temperature drop. 

Even with the summer crops all removed, the garden is still about halfway full, with crops ranging from carrots and shelling peas to escarole and kale still growing through the cold. The carrots and peas are protected by row cover, but many of the others, particularly the spinach and those in the brassica family like kale and arugula, have some unique adaptations that allows them to make it through at least these earlier frosts. These plants have the ability to move water out of their cells as the temperature drops, preventing the cells from bursting when the water freezes. In addition, as temperatures cool, these plants can increase their sugar content, which essentially works like antifreeze, allowing the water in the plants to remain unfrozen below 32 degrees. And you may have noticed the added benefit of this as you eat these crops later into the fall- this increased sugar content is noticeable to our taste buds, too, making these crops sweeter as the season goes on! 

Otherwise, we are making sure to enjoy the final harvests to the max before winter sets in and are beginning to enjoy the hard work of summer by opening at least one can of preserved food a week. So far, these Zany Zucchini Pickles have been the biggest hit, with our 1-year-old eating most of the jar himself!