The freeze is past us. At last! Saturday morning, I quickly went out to the garden and began unfurling the big tarps off of the garden vegetables. I was curious to see what we had remaining. The lowest our temperatures got was 14 degrees, but it stayed well below freezing for a number of days. In reading about plants' ability to survive in frozen temperatures, much mention was made not only of the low temperatures, but of the length of time that the frozen temperatures persisted. Both variables do not stand in our favor.
I've already resigned myself to the fact that we may have lost everything. In a "glass half full" perspective, this just means we'll have more room to plant the spring garden earlier. I think we'll give the plants a few days under the sunshine and warmer temperatures to decide what to do. Let's look at each row and the prognosis.
I harvested all of the turnips and radishes in the midst of the freeze. The cows and goats enjoyed eating the greens and the roots. I added some additional mulch atop the rows of those harvested crops. Moving to the left, the swiss chard is hurt pretty bad. After this photo was taken, we cut them down to the ground to see if fresh growth will come. The Brussels sprouts look fairly unaffected. Good news.
The carrots look green and relatively healthy. The greenery is just flattened as the water/ice on top of the tarp mashed it down. I'll give them a few days to see if the sunshine perks up the greens. It is about time to harvest the carrots, blanch them and freeze them anyway. Probably tomorrow I'll pull a carrot to ensure the root itself wasn't damaged by the freeze.
In the upper left hand corner, you can see the Galilee Spinach. I had been allowing it to go to seed to save seed for next fall crop. I will give it a few days, but I think I lost the seed! Unfortunate, but c'est la vie.
The lettuce is a mess. We pulled it all up and tossed it to the chickens. They enjoyed the tossed salad. We had our most productive lettuce crop ever. All good things must come to an end, I assume.
The bull's blood beets' foliage are flat and freeze damaged. Similar to the carrots, I'll give them a few days to see if they bounce back or if I need to harvest the beet roots.
The dinosaur kale (lacinato kale) looks fairly unaffected. The cabbage is damaged, however, and we'll have to see if they survive. You can see they have a yellow, sickly tinge to them. The broccoli is still standing. We'll see if they continue to produce little florets that we have been enjoying.
I was very worried about our onion crop. They were looking SO good! The onion tops are flattened somewhat and there is leaf damage. A few days will be needed to see if they are resilient and bounce back. Boy, I sure hope so!
Finally, the mustard green row had some leaf damage, but they'll make it. I picked off some of the damaged leaves and the cows and goats were appreciative.
All in all, it could have been a lot worse. We'll report the verdict for those crops that the jury is still out on in a few days. Meanwhile, our goal is to get our potato crop in the ground this week. We're about a week late right now, but who's counting?
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