My condolences. I expect a light frost any time. We're in a low lying area so I'll get a frost before my neighbors. Trying to decide when to close up the high tunnel. Probably this week. I'm home more so can roll up sides if it gets too warm.

Sorry to hear. The clock is ticking here too, could happen any time now. Last year we got the first hard frost on September 14. Two years ago we did not get the first hard frost until the second week in October.

I consider the first hard frost to be the official start of the next gardening season. After the frost there will still be some harvests here before the snow flies such as lettuce, spinach, radishes, parsnips, and horseradish, but the focus will shift to the future. Fall cleanup is prep for next year. I will be planting garlic in late October along with winter onion topsets, multiplier onions, shallots. These are the first crops I will be putting in the ground for 2014. The cycle doesn't end, it continues...

-Tom

I'm not waiting for frost this year, seeing how the heat made it not worthwhile to count on a lot of fall crops. Potatoes are gone, melon vines are gone, one by one I'm pulling cukes, squash and tomatoes that aren't productive anymore.

It was a pretty good year overall, but it's winding down on its own, well before frost.

I learned years ago not to trust the weatherman. He said it wasn't going to rain July 4th. We had a big party and we ended up inside because it was raining. So many other times, I should have trusted the forecast and I didn't. It pays to cover when you have at least a doubt to cover or not.

As an extreme summer crop lover, I would go mad trying to grow some of the stuff you grow in your climate.

Zone 2 okra still blows my mind (heck, anything below Zone 5 for okra blows my mind)...especially as someone who considers okra a garden staple and quite under-appreciated even in my part of the world, the South-East US (which is evidently supposed to love the stuff according to lore, but it is rarely seen in the garden and rarely used aside from frying it or making "gumbo").

There is an extreme generation gap with okra in the South...younger vegetable gardeners rarely grow it and they're missing out. A great non-bitter fleshy "green" outside with big sweet+tender seeds contained within that has it's own natural flavor-neutral thickener built in...shame, really. Cut up okra + cut up toms + diced onion/peppers and some beans or diced squash (occasionally some sweet corn thrown in) makes for a hell of a varied side dish you can eat with a fork...great stuff.

I hope those that share/purchase your produce appreciate what you do.

Good luck next summer.

This post was edited by nc-crn on Tue, Sep 17, 13 at 5:42

Thanks :)

I gotta say that I've temporarily given up on growing okra. It works out only once every three years. Eventually I'd like to get a high tunnel with just a smidgeon of heat added at night, maybe by using heating cables. That would probably make it work.
This wasn't a great year for eggplant either although it is more tolerant of cool weather than okra is. July was cool but it heated up nicely in August and brought forth a bounty of tomatillos and ground cherries.

We won't get frost until November. Cukes and peppers growing like crazy in our first hugel. Pumpkins thriving, but they got started late.

Hey Slimy, if you really like your okra but have given up, start a few plants indoors and during summer grow them in large pots in a sunny spot up by the house. You will at least get some to enjoy every year using this method.

I am not a huge fan of either eggplant or okra, but I would really miss them both if I stopped growing them. Last couple of years I have been growing 3 to 5 plants of each in their own containers with excellent results. I could certainly grow both in the garden but I only need a few plants, and being in containers up by the house the plants get babied and I get very nice quality harvests from both types. This method also has the advantage of allowing me to simply bring the plants into the garage on cold nights in order to extend the growing season a bit, at least until the low sun angle, short day lengths, and cold daily temps end up doing in the plants. A simple, cheap solution, at least until your high tunnel plans come to fruition.

I learned the hard way a few years ago that we get a light frost around Sept 18 and sure enough it happened again. Seems very related to the full moon. Fortunately my husband heard the frost warning and we covered things. It's funny. He went for tarps which we used on the pepper plants but they needed to be removed the next day and it was already pretty hot underneath. I used Agribon fabric on cucumbers. The vine that didn't get covered died from cold but that light garden fabric protected the rest of the plants. It's hard to believe.

We have an unheated high tunnel which has only been thru one winter. I have so much to learn. The spinach was great all winter but lettuce didn't make it thru the cold nights. This year I'm trying hardier varieties that are suggested in Eliot Coleman's books. Basically, it still gets as cold inside as it is outside at night but warms up a lot during the day so the ground never freezes (I'm in NH). I'm not sure how many extra weeks before and after the regular growing season you can get out of things like eggplant that prefer warm weather. I talked with a market garden who does use a heater sometimes to get an early start on tomatoes.

It got me this weekend. I have been watching the forecast all week and the prediction had been for 38 Friday night. I had been battling a cold so I tried to cover some things during the course of the week but there was only so much I could get to. I would have picked all of the large tomatoes but most of them were cracked from the freak rain storms here in NM and those just tend to get too moldy. My average first frost is October 15th. All day Friday I watched the forecast get lower and lower until it stabilized at 33. Even though I expected it I still cried when I saw the damage. I guess clean up this year just starts earlier for me. We will hit a high of 77 this week and next Friday there is another freeze predicted.

"I gotta say that I've temporarily given up on growing okra. It works out only once every three years."

Slimy_okra, you might want to try growing Martynia. Although it is a native of the U.S. desert Southwest, it has shown good cold tolerance here, and grows incredibly quickly - it is one of the fastest-growing plants in my garden. The very young pods are okra-like, and can be eaten that way or pickled. They develop fiber quickly though, eventually growing into the sharp, curved pods that earned it the nickname of "devil's claw".

I grow one member of the family (Proboscidea parviflora), and it has very little difficulty growing to maturity here. In fact, it is so well adapted that I no longer need to plant it intentionally... it volunteers every year, and I just pull out all but a few plants that are out of the way. I can post more info, or send you seeds if interested.

Zeedman, could I send you an SASE for some of that proboscidea parviflora?

zeedman,
Never heard of martynia but I would love to grow it! I'm always up for trying new vegetables. I live in Canada so I'm not sure how to send you an American SASE. Can I send you some money by PayPal to cover postage? Much appreciated!

No need for a Canadian SASE, I can't imagine how difficult that would be to accomplish... just send me your address via my member page.

Pnbrown, a SASE would be fine... email sent.

As Alan Chadwick taught, washing the frost off with the hose before the sun hits the plants in the morning will usually save them. Check the following website for more on this.

Alan Chadwick

Click on techniques, then on your subject.

Here is a link that might be useful: Alan Chadwick