OK, no more jokes about letting the tomatoes freeze out just because it is a struggle to cover them up in a wind. We did end up losing ~100 of the 400 tomatoes to the frost despite the fact they were covered. It was the duration of the frost that did them in. From what we’ve been told the frost settled around 1AM and lasted till 9. With the row cover simply laying on top of the plants the cold eventually wept its way through. There are quite a few more that are damaged but should survive. And then there are the others that if they could talk they would say something like “frost? what frost? we didn’t see any frost” Strange…. they are all in the same area of the garden and all were covered up with the same material. Luckily, we did have replacement tomatoes that were originally intended to be sold as plants at the Bath Farmers Market. Now I think we are done planting tomatoes.
One crop that seems to just be loving these cool nights is our spinach. We were able to make a batch of baby food for our 8 month old son Jonas last night. It was pretty amazing to watch a huge amount of spinach pureed down to just a few meals. Rest assured, he is ready to go fight Bluto now.
Along with the spinach, everyone will receive a few other greens. Turnip greens, Lettuce mix, and Kale all are in Box 1. As well as asparagus, radishes, and rhubarb. Hard to believe, but last year we had strawberries for week 1. Looks like it will be more like week 3 this year. They too were roughed up a bit by the frost.
You know, it don’t come easy!
Greg