Well, it’s finally happened….. The first frost of the year. After another beautiful start to the week, the end of last week finally returned to appropriate fall temperatures. And then over the weekend we had our first two frosty mornings. The first frost of the season is always a little bittersweet to me. I look at it as the end of the summer season of vegetables and then the true start of the fall heartiness. Lots of the fall crops that we grow begin to sweeten up as their sugars go into overdrive with the cooler nighttime temperatures. Our fall carrots (which we haven’t begun to harvest yet) really benefit from this. Even though we had these frosts, there wasn’t too much damage. I was hoping to get one more harvest of basil but it was toast this morning when I got out to the field. The only other crop that showed any significant signs of damage was our beans. We have two more plantings out in the field, one that we started harvesting last week and one that is loaded with flowers. I’m hopeful that we’ll still get some more beans but we’ll have to wait and see.
Last week we continued to our push to get ready for the winter months on the farm. Because the weather can turn to the point of no return at any moment, we are trying to get larger quantities of our root crops out of the ground. We were able to get more beets, carrots and potatoes out of the ground. Hopefully, most of the rest of them will be out by the end of the month. Another big job last week was to “top” our heirloom tomato plants.
