Preparing for the Frost
When I recorded the daily maximum and minimum
temperatures before going to bed last night, I was shocked to notice
that it had gotten down to 33 F outdoors the night before. So I
scurried around in the dark to bring in my most sensitive plants, just
in case it got one degree colder that night.Top of the list was the dwarf Meyers lemon tree. Mark's mom gave me this tree as an infant at Christmas last year (the best Christmas present I've ever received!) and already it's sporting four baby lemons. No way I was going to give it any chance of getting nipped by the frost!
Luckily, we didn't get our first frost last night, but I know that it's time to start making serious decisions. Like --- should I try to bring in one of the unblighted tomato plants even though that experiment didn't work well last year? Should I move the row covers which are currently protecting my strawberries from being munched onto the bell peppers which are just starting to ripen so that they'll have time to give us more than the three fruits we've currently eaten? Or should I give up the ghost and pick the dozens of peppers as green instead of red?
Unfortunately, I took last week off, so this week I'm scurrying around to catch up with work for my nonprofit and may have no time to do any of that! I may have to leave it all in Mark's capable hands.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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