There may be some variation in freeze tolerance depending upon the cultivar. A few years back I had the experience of a freeze in the mid 20's (didn't record the temp) in which most of the remaining Hosui had some freeze damage but none of the Korean Giant were damaged.

Hello all. I'm new to this group and a neophyte with figs. But I have a couple of questions that I seek your assistance with. I bought a fig tree last year. I don't know the variety. But I got perhaps 11 figs that year that were quite purply/black when ripened and very tasty. The tree then was about 4 feet tall. I'm in zone 5 (Central NYS) so the winters are harsh. At the end of the season I let the leaves wither from the first frost and brought the large container with tree into my unheated basement. I covered it with a thick white sheet and just gave it a little water every month so as not to dry out (the white sheet idea came from a website where home growers had a forum. It might have been this one) In March, the tree decided to grow leaves, to my dismay. Perhaps some scant light from windows in the basement encouraged it. So I took the sheet off and moved it to the glass door where it would get a couple of hours of sunlight daily. It was doing really well. I moved it back to my terrace around Mother's Day, which is supposed to be frost free thereafter in my parts. But it wasn't and a frost killed all of the new, lovely leaves. Over the following months it grew back all of its leaves but no figs. Now it was around 6' tall Labor Day I noticed that I was getting at least 15 figs. Right now the biggest is about thumb zize, and any day/week now we will have a frost. Here's the questions: Should I move it into my heated home in a sunny window, add grow lights, and hope the figs mature. Or will they? If I do that, should I just let it grow for the winter in the home and hope to get another set of figs in the spring? Or does it need to be dormant for a time? Or should I just leave the tree on the terrace and let the frost kill off the leaves and baby figs and repeat the over-wintering I did this past year? Thanks in advance for any advice.

A lot depends on what our weather does. Most years my watermelons last a bit more deeply into fall than muskmelons, true cantaloupes and other miscellaneous melons do. Once the temperatures drop substantially and the daylength is a littler shorter every day, the melons slow down in growth and can take a longer time to mature. However, they will eventually mature. I am about to take out my muskmelon plants and watermelon plants in the front garden so I can clean up that bed, but I'm going to let the watermelon plants out back go on for as long as they can. Last year we harvested a couple dozen watermelons in October and November, and the flavor was fine but the melons were, for the most part, smaller than fruit on the same vines had been back in the summer months. I just leave the plants alone and let them do their thing. I don't cover them up on cold nights, I don't pinch off blossoms and I don't tip-prune. Our average last frost date is in mid-November, but sometimes the first frost hits in latest September and sometimes not until mid-December, so I'd rather let the plants go on producing for as long as Mother Nature will allow. I missed a couple of melons last year when I harvested the last of them on the day before the first freeze was expected to occur that night, and I didn't find them until 3 or 4 weeks after the first freeze. By the time I found the melons buried under a lot of dead, brown foliage, they'd been exposed to overnight lows as low as 18 degrees and I was surprised they weren't rotting. One wasn't any good. It was smaller and likely was a long way from maturing when the freeze hit. The other one was large and probably was completely mature when we froze, and its very thick rind protected the flesh inside (which surprised me). It was very tasty, but not quite as tasty as summer melons from the same plant that matured in much hotter weather. So, even if your melon has time to reach its mature size and to ripen fully on the vine, the flavor might not be as good as you remember because it matured under cooler conditions. You could try to keep the melons warmer by putting a low tunnel (PVC or EMT hoops covered with clear plastic) over them, but be aware that if you do that, you have to watch them closely because the greenhouse effect can roast the plants to death, and a lack of air flow can encourage fungal diseases. If I was going to to that, I'd probably pull the plastic back off the hoops during the day and pull it back over the hoops in late afternoon to hold in the heat during the night. And, I'd make the hoops go a foot or two above the top of the trellis. If your clear plastic is too close to the plants even in cool autumn weather, they plants can get too hot and be damaged or even killed. My garden does pay for itself most years. I generally can about 600 pints of food and fill up 2 or 3 deep freezes, and then have onions, garlic, potatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes and winter squash in dry storage for the winter months. However, it also costs more money to process and store more food, so the longer the garden is producing heavily, the more money it costs us in terms of processing and storing the excess part of the harvest that we cannot eat fresh. It has taken me many years, though, to arrive at the point where I feel like the garden does pay for itself......and, even if it didn't, I'd have a big garden anyway. I don't garden just as a way to save money in the food budget. I do it because I enjoy it (and I have about 100 other reasons) and I like knowing how our food was grown (as naturally as possible) and I enjoy sharing the produce with our friends and family. Even though I put up a lot of the harvest to eat later on, my favorite thing to do is to eat fresh from the garden in season. You know, when asparagus is in season, I'd never go to the store and buy vast quantities of it so we could eat it once or twice a day for weeks on end, but when it is coming from our own garden, we do eat it once or twice a day for weeks on end. It is the same thing with everything else---something like melons could be on the menu once or twice a week if we didn't have a garden. With a garden? They can be on the menu daily at the height of the season, and often I have enough to share. I often feed the chickens a melon of their own in very hot weather, and sometimes slice one up for the deer as well. A large and highly productive garden lets you do things with food that you wouldn't do if you were paying grocery store prices for that food. Tim wouldn't be happy with me if I went to the grocery store and bought a melon for the chickens!

I used to wait for the first frost to wilt the leaves and make the tomatoes easy to find. Then there was the year the first frost was a hard freeze. Bring your tomatoes in and they will ripen nicely. If they are frost damaged, you will know pretty quick.