First Frost and Freeze

I believe we had a light frost on October 17.

We are having a hard frost right now.  It is well below 30F (-2C) on our back porch right now.  This makes it a "freeze."

In my experience in Northern Illinois since 1986, this is a significantly later frost/freeze than average.

Our growing season this year was May 15 through October 22.  That is about 4 weeks longer than what I generally plan for (June 1-October 5).

Interestingly, though, the tomato plants had pretty much died off by the first of October, when we usually have our first frost.

August harvesting

We just returned from the garden. I'm not feeling well, so Jo did all the work.

It was quite dusty, but there seemed to be some moisture down an inch or two. Despite the dryness, all the plants seem to be doing well.

We got a dozen or so tomatoes! And Joanne picked two baskets of beans! She also got lots of beets and turnips.

It will be nice to get out there so that we can weed. It won't take much but it needs to be done.

Update: Lots of rain and lots of weeds

Here is how our garden looks today.

Second planting of beans

First planting of beans.

Sunflowers

Beets (left) and Fennel

Fennel close up

Onions, scallions.

And, of course, lots of grass that needs to be cut and weeds that need to be pulled.  It was too wet today (and I was not wearing dirtyable clothes).

Frost

Ugh,

We planted too early.  We had a frost last week.  About 1/3 of our peppers and 2/3 of our tomatoes were killed.

Ugh.

Planting!

We planted a lot of our garden yesterday!  Here is our tomato patch of 34 plants:

And here is one of our fine, young plants:

Joanne planted 2 rows of beans:

And some fennel:

We begin our 2013 garden

Jo and I went to the garden this afternoon.  I tilled most of the garden, and she planted three rows of spring crops (onions, shallots, garlic, leeks, collards, etc.).  Here are the results:

Yay!

I prepared the first two rows for planting the tomatoes:

The idea is to arrange the tomato cages in a large grid with plenty of room (40 inches) to till in both directions (E/W and N/S):

The images here are a little hard to discern--have a look at the high res versions.

2012 Summary

Here is a summary for our garden in 2012:

We planted.

We weeded.

We planted some more.

We weeded again.

We went to Florida to welcome our first grandchild (the most beautiful baby girl ever seen by human-kind).

We watered.

We harvested the onions and fennel.

We weeded, again.

I rototilled amongst the rows.

We watered.  Then applied Sevin dust to the squash plants.

Joanne weeded while I sipped tea.

We harvested squash, beans and the last of the onions.

We weeded.

We watched a flock of geese fly over.

We chatted with the neighboring gardeners.

We weeded.

We picked a tomato.  It was yummy.

We harvested the last of the squash, and some more beans.

We picked some okra and saw some new bug that likes okra!  Applied Sevin dust.

I rototilled amongst the rows again.

We picked a couple of baskets of tomatoes.

We picked four more baskets of tomatoes--Tomato Emergency declared!  Friends from Plainfield and Batavia came to the rescue.

We picked more tomatoes.

Got sick of putting up tomatoes, but we persevered.

The peppers really did not do too well this year.  But we got enough to put up more sliced hot peppers than we can eat.

More tomatoes.  Not too many okra.

We got a frost.

We cleared the garden.

I rototilled.

I moved some compost into the garden.

I rototilled again.

We hibernated until now. :--)