Port Potager

Last night temperatures here dropped into the low 20s overnight — and for many hours. That’s officially the end of the growing season, as you can see by the state of this butternut squash vine: It was quite a cold morning, and the frost stayed on everything well after the sun came up. It was quite pretty, too: We had already picked our tender fruits last week in response to an (unwarranted) frost warning, so all we had to do last night was put up a few last tunnels over some of our greens : We tossed an old army blanket over the beets and cut a last harvest of Swiss chard. I left the celery alone, and it doesn’t seem much worse for wear this morning — it’s pretty tough. Still, we should probably bring it in by tomorrow, since the cold looks to be getting worse before it will get better.  After a very warm fall, it looks like fall is here to stay.

It's that time of year again: Frost is on its way. That means it's time to get our butts in gear and protect our fall veggies from getting nipped back by the cold. With proper care, leafy greens should last through year's end, and leeks and carrots will be fine all winter (though there's no guarantee we'll be able to get to them , but they'll survive nonetheless). We never, ever manage to take care of this until the very day temperatures are expected to drop below freezing. This year there's the whole kitchen thing , but there's always something. The trouble with that is that, without fail, the day we put up the tunnels us the windiest, coldest day of the fall. Today was no exception. The streak is alive. Still, we got it done. This year we put our longest ever tunnel in place: This stretches the full 27 feet across our longest bed along the brick path. Inside are leeks, beets, turnips, bok choy, mesclun, and a handful of carrots. ...

Between last weekend and today, we made our final push to clean up the garden for the winter. Though the veggie beds and winter tunnels have been ready to go for some time, we still had to take care of the perennial border: This is my least favorite task of the whole year, the trimming back of all the perennial plants and the raking of leaves for the winter clean-up. I am always sorely tempted to call it all mulch and let it go, but it is much harder to clean up in the spring before the bulbs come up. So here we are, out in the cold getting it taken care of before what looks to be a week-long nor'easter heads our way. Also crossed off the list was some plant protection: This is our little fig tree. Last year we corralled it in a box of leaves, but it was such a harsh winter that that it died most of the way back anyway. Over the summer it did put out two new shoots, and it looks like we may have a fig bush instead of a tree. Because it is so small, we wrappe...

Back in the spring we planted a fig tree in the orchard. After a season of growth, it has graduated from a mere stick to a slightly more respectable baby tree:  Frost has killed off its (very few) leaves, so it's time to get our little Brown Turkey tree wrapped up for winter. Figs are not reliably hardy in our growing zone (6a), so we need to give it some protection from the cold so it doesn't die back too much over the winter. To do this, we repurposed two of the potato boxes we are no longer using to create a little fort around the tree: Kirk set one box atop the other and screwed in two extra boards to across the gap to join them together (which you can see better in the picture below). This contraption is all wood and heavy as all get-out, so it should hold its ground despite our typically blustery winter weather .  Once the boxes were in place, we filled the whole thing to the top with leaves we raked up: We have no dearth of maple leaves ...

Come, ye thankful people, come, Raise the song of harvest home! All is safely gathered in, Ere the winter storms begin... ~Henry Alford The forecast for tonight is for temperatures to drop down to 30 degrees, and the National Weather Service issued its official freeze warning. That meant that I spent about an hour and a half bringing in the last of our summer harvest. I picked all the tender things that just won't make it through any bit of frost: beans, peppers, eggplant, okra, and a last few lavender buds. Here's why it took so long: That is a whole lot of peppers! We didn't realize we had so many bell peppers because they're hard to see when they are still green, and we were kind of waiting for them to turn. But now we're out of time, and I guess smarter farmers would have been enjoying them all along as green peppers instead of waiting for them to turn yellow, orange, and red. We've had a few very sweet, colorful ones, but It's jus...

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...

It may be too early to offer a solid verdict here. We won't know for absolutely certain if the blossoms survived until they swell into baby fruits in a few weeks. So far, though, things look okay. First, the apple tree in its tent: It was fairly warm in there when I poked my head in this afternoon, and I think this tree should be fine. The tent managed to stay up in the wind, and with the heat and coverage I think it should do okay for the next couple of cold nights (which aren't supposed to be quite as cold as last night). A closer look at the state of the blossoms: To my eye, these seem unscathed, so I'm feeling pretty good about the prospects for the apples. On the other hand, it looks like the apricot blossoms got some frostbite in the wind and the cold: It's not terrible, but you can see that (despite the lights nearby), some petals are brown and dead. I am somewhat hopeful, though, because I didn't see any blossoms that lost all the...

Remember when it was in the 80s for two weeks and everything burst into bloom while I was at the beach? Well, yesterday the temperatures plummeted, and in our backyard the low hit 25 degrees. That wasn't just a kiss of 25 and a quick warm-up when the sun came up, either. It was down to 32 at sunset, so it was at or below freezing for at least 12 hours last night. Did I mention winds from the north gusting to 40 mph? We knew it was coming (well, except for the winds, although given the windy   weather history here , I suppose we should have expected that as well), so I was researching how to protect our tender fruit trees over the weekend. Because they are big (well, in general — ours aren't actually all that big yet), fruit trees are harder to protect than other tender plants that are low to the ground and can just get covered up. For example, our cold frame is easy: Notice, though, that this time we used some leftover bricks as weights so the glass wou...