Protection for Tomatoes During a Late Frost

So last night we had a frost and my husband got his chance to tell me 'I told you so'. The weather predictions kept saying the low would be 40 degrees F, but fortunately I am a born pessimist. 40 degrees would be fine to leave the babies unprotected if you had some assurance that temps would not go any lower. Planning for the worst, I rushed home from  work to cover my baby tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, tomatillas, muskmelon and beans (did not know if they would be sensitive to the frost but I was on a roll).  First, I used frost cloth to form a tent over my Armenian cucumbers which was tedious and time consuming. As I was poring over the best solution for the rest of the veggies my husband, kicked back, drinking a beer and watching my shenanigans, suggested covering the plants with pots. My first inclination was to disdain this suggestion because he is, after all, a non-gardener. But I had to admit the idea had merit. I was cold, tired and a glass of wine was calling my name. So I took out all my plastic pots and buckets (I have many) and in 5 minutes flat had all my babies covered with their own black plastic greenhouses.

This morning we woke up to 37 degrees at 8:30 a.m., so who knows how low temps dipped at sunrise. I was nervous. I had visions of all my starts being a mushy, wilted mess, and having to start all over again. So I waited until temps were over 40 to uncover everyone, and......they all looked fine. It absolutely worked.  So hopefully we are done with frosts but if not I am good to go with my nursery pots.

Covering baby tomato plants with nursery pots

Not fancy but it worked

Healthy, happy tomato plant the next day

Review -Winter Garden

As I am tearing out my the last of my winter garden, I thought I'd share a few things I learned with this garden.

Purple Carrots: I do not particularly like carrots, I grow them for my mother to eat (she loves raw carrots), for juicing (health benefits, not taste), and to use in stews (they are easy to freeze and store). My mom's opinion on the purple carrots was that they were not as good raw as the orange varieties I grew. She said they were not as sweet, and had a stronger carroty flavor. Reading up on the domestication of carrots, it would appear that the purple colored variety is less domesticated than the oranges and yellows. However, I found that in the garden the purple variety grew twice as fast as the orange, which is probably due to their more primitive nature. wink. In the future I will plant a small area of the orange, sweeter varieties, for momma's fresh eating. And then do a larger area in the purple as the sweetness is less of a factor for juicing and cooking.

Purple Haze Carrots mixed with orange varieties

Apollo Broccoli:  This was the best variety of Broccoli that I have ever grown and/or eaten! I could pick enough sprouts for dinner for two people every three days. The flavor and the vigor of this variety was phenomenal. It broke my heart to pull them this weekend, but with the warmer temps, the sprouts were going almost straight to flower anyway. In the future, I will not waste time or space on any other Broccoli variety for eating.

Apollo Broccoli covered in shoots

Romanesco Broccoli: I was intrigued to try this variety as it looks really cool, and is pricey to buy in the grocery stores, if you can even find it. This variety of broccoli is not vigorous... at all. I waited all winter, watching these plants grow...ever...so...slowly.  Finally, I was rewarded with those beautiful, geometric, chartreuse Romanesco heads, and they were delicious...but very small.  In the future, I will skip growing this variety unless I have a bed with nothing else planned....and time on my hands.

Head of Romanesco Broccoli about 4" across

There is no denying that this is one pretty vegetable

Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage: This variety of cabbage, despite being an early variety, seemed to take forever to form heads. Although this may be attributable to how warm the winter season began. Then in early February the heads were looking really good and ready to harvest. On a Friday I walked through the garden planning to pull the heads the next day. Saturday morning I walk out to find one of the heads had split. This never happened with Flat Dutch. The Flat Dutch, which is supposed to be a late variety, formed heads earlier and I could leave those babies in the garden forever without them splitting. In the future, go back with Flat Dutch for cabbage.

Beautiful heads of cabbage one day

Split cabbage head the next

Tomatoes, Peppers and Squash... Oh My!

This weather seriously needs to warm up...right now! I have a greenhouse full of veggies ready to go in the ground. And my beds are cleared, prepped and ready to go. All I am waiting on is to get past the last threat of frost. To be honest, I am probably just going to take my chances and plant out the majority of my veggie babies this weekend. If we get a late frost, I'll end up doing like I did last year. Rush home from work, pick up frost covers and run around the garden in the dark covering up all the babies, with my husband standing nearby saying 'I told you so'.

Right now in the greenhouse I have several varieties of tomatoes ready to go: Chianti Rose, Beefmaster, Wapsipinicon Peach, Bush Big Boy, San Marzano, Coure de Bue, Roma, Pink Brandywine, and Black Krim. I also have the 'Vermont Cranberry' Beans, 'Pike' Muskmelon, 'Seminole' Pumpkin, 'Fancy Crookneck' Summer Squash, and 'Cossack Pineapple' Tomatilla.  I typically grow everything from seed to reduce disease introduction, except for the Bell Peppers. For some reason it takes too long to grow peppers from seed. Therefore I cheat and buy starts to grow out in the greenhouse for a few months. This way I'll be eating peppers by May.

Bell Peppers and Tomatoes

Tomatoes and Muskmelon

Vermont Cranberry Beans and Tomatillas

Tomatoes in the foreground

Messy Greenhouse                                        

                                           
My other motivation for planting out some of my stock is to free up some room in my tiny greenhouse. I mostly use it for storage during the warmer months because it does not have ventilation fans and gets HOT. But then during the winter when I am doing all my starts to get a jump on the spring/summer garden, I end up running out of room.

Taking Care of My Pollinators

It's difficult this time of year to have flowers to support my pollinators, to keep them interested enough in my yard to hang around until my Spring garden. The winter garden does not have many vegetables that require pollination, mostly greens and  root vegetables. And most flowering plants cannot survive both the occasional frost as well as the typical central Florida heat and humidity. But I do have a couple of species that work, and are low maintenance.

Borage grows great during Florida winters, I love the beautiful purple blooms and even the hairy leaves have visual interest.

Surprisingly the African Bush Daisy was not even fazed by the worst of the frosts in the 20's this winter.

But my best flowering plant for keeping the pollinators around is Broccoli that I let bolt and go to flower. I discovered this last winter unintentionally. I tried a sprouting variety of Broccoli called 'Pericicaba'. A sprouting variety does not put out just one big main head but several smaller sprouting heads. Unfortunately the 'Pericicaba' variety is not good for eating here in Florida as it bolts quickly in our warmer winters and goes to flower. So last winter I was just too lazy to pull them and discovered that the bees love the flowers and these plants were continuously covered in flowers.

Spring Seeds Ordered

I'm getting restless for my spring/summer garden and the seed catalogs have been showing up in the mail, one a day, for the past week. So I gave in and placed my first order. I may have to expand to plant all the stuff I've got coming in, and I don't know who is going to eat it all since it's only the two of us.

Pinetree Garden Seeds and Accessories:
Vermont Cranberry- dried bean variety, I haven't grown dried beans before but it would be nice to grow something that is easily stored. I just don't have time for the whole canning thing, and am so-so at freezing my excess veggies.
Yard Long- Asian bean that is also referred to as Asparagus bean. Very heat tolerant and productive, which would be great to have in the garden in the middle of summer when everything else is burned out. And you can never have enough fresh eating bean varieties, so easy to harvest and cook.
Painted Serpent Cucumber- this is odd as it is sold as a cucumber but is really a type of melon, but tastes like a mild cucumber. It's a snake shaped Armenian variety and supposed to be a prolific producer and I am always curious to try new varieties (besides if I don't like it I can feed it to the chickens). I'll also be planting my usual cucumber variety 'County Fair' which is incredibly resistant to powdery mildew and produces good amounts of tasty fresh eating and pickling cukes.
Pepino- I am so excited to try this melon. It produces 2 - 5" fruit that taste like a pearish melon.
Minnesota Midget- a small early variety of muskmelon that grows on compact vines. Since I am always battling powdery mildew on my cucurbits I seek varieties that either have good resistance or are early so as to beat the heat and rains of a Florida summer.
Strawberry Spinach- a variety of greens that grow during the heat of summer and taste like spinach. How awesome would it be to have spinach tasting fresh greens to make a salad with my summer tomatoes.
Wapsipinicon Peach Tomato- a small sized tomato that is supposed to be fruity tasting, with a peach fuzz skin.

 Tomato Growers Supply Company:
Black Krim
Pink Brandywine
Jubilee 

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange:
Pike Cantaloupe- produces large fruit, and has excellent disease resistance.
Seminole pumpkin- highly productive heirloom native pumpkin variety with incredible resistance to everything that afflicts cultivated vegetables in Florida.
Ground Cherry Cossack Pineapple- yellow, fruity tasting tomatillo.
Monarda- great flowering herb for my pollinators.

Ode to Rutabaga

I just had to write some more about growing Rutabaga in Florida.  The variety I grow is 'American Purple Top', which is probably the most popular and widely grown. Most people are turned off by Rutabagas in the grocery store because they look so much like Turnips, which is a valid concern. I have grown two varieties of Turnip that were purported to be non-bitter and  delicious and it was a lie, Turnips are gross. But I was pleasantly surprised by Rutabagas. Their flavor is very mild, and they are an excellent replacement for potatoes.

Peeled Rutabagas ready for the cook pot

Rutabagas in the Florida garden are very easy to grow during the winter season, they can take unseasonable heat as well as our brief cold spells and frosts. I barely even fertilize them, and they are unfazed by too much or too little rain/irrigation. Most often I find half of the Rutabaga above ground as the root swells, but they are not tender and do not need to be covered with more soil.

Fresh Rutabaga just pulled from the garden

They do not split or get get pithy as other root crops will often do, so they can be left in the soil until you are ready to eat them.

They produce a copious amount of foliage, which can be eaten as greens, but I haven't tried this as I already have so many other varieties of greens in the garden during winter. However, my chickens and compost pile do appreciate this abundance.

Small Harvest

Since I usually only harvest what I plan to eat, I don't take the time to photograph actual harvests. Today I pulled more than usual and had them drying out from washing, so my husband convinced me to post a picture of my veggies.

The description is clockwise: The radishes I usually don't eat, I grow and cut the greens for my chickens. However, today I pulled a handful to eat with a salad. The small pile of ugly peas are the only crop of English Peas this winter, they were NOT happy with how warm this winter has been. Under the English Peas are a few stalks of the sprouting Broccoli, 'Apollo'.  Then the last of the Sugar Snap Peas from the existing vines.  These will be pulled shortly and I will re-seed for a second crop, the peas are so sweet and delicious that I have no idea why I even tried with the English Peas. And finally, the first carrots of the winter garden, including a few of the famous purple carrots.