Cold Frame Hubris

Last weekend, in a fit of overconfidence, we took the cold frame off of our salad greens and put it away for the winter. Today's helpful weather.com graphic:

Oops. 

And back into place it goes. After the two inches of rain that got dumped on us at the beginning of the week, the lettuce and spinach really took off, and now we should be in salad for the duration (maybe forever, if we manage the cold frames and winter garden well). No way are we risking losing that, so everything is back where it was.

Also in need of covering are the new basil and cilantro plants I got last weekend:

They are still quite small, so we cut the bottoms off some of our emergency tree-saving milk jugs and used them as cheap cloches. The bricks are to hold them down because — surprise! — it's windy. AGAIN.

Also in the photo above are some peas. They aren't very big yet, but peas are cool-weather vegetables (like most of what is in the garden right now). All we did for things that should be fairly hardy is water them, because moist earth holds in some heat and will radiate it back into the air over night, which will keep everything just a degree or two warmer.

We used some light row cover fabric to cover our newly emerged seedlings here, though:

Although the things in this row are also for cold weather (bok choy, spinach, lettuces, etc.), they are still very tiny, with no adult leaves yet. To be on the safe side, we added the row cover. You can also see a bucket that we used to cover our new rosemary plant. All of the perennial herbs should be ok, but rosemary is the least hardy of them, so we decided to cover it anyway. Kirk also covered some new potato leaves with big scoops of compost to protect those leaves from any frostbite.

As usual, we had to scramble to get all these things into place. It's only supposed to get down to 32 degrees, so it might not be that big of a deal, but we are much better safe than sorry. Still, it was not fun as the temperature dropped and the winds gusted to 30 mph. Again.