First frost

Well, I saw the first frost yesterday morning (at least, I was up early enough to see whether there was frost). We had been prepared for it though…

Here’s a picture of the dying garden on Saturday afternoon before I started the dismantling process.

The tomato and pepper plants aren’t really quite dead, but it’s too chilly (and not sunny enough any more with our exposure) for anything to efficiently ripen. You can see, though, that the cucumber plants in the foreground are dry and dead looking.

Our plan for the winter is to dump the potting soil out of the pots and salvage what we can. We’ll store it in the grey tub (in the picture below) on the balcony for the winter.

Other gardening stuff (extra fertilizer, epsom salts, perlite, small pots) will get stored in the clear plastic tub. I’m planning to scrub the terracotta pots with some bleach solution (there’s some mossy-ness growing on the outsides of some of them) and store them stacked upside-down with bubble wrap between them. But all of that probably won’t happen until this coming weekend. It’s too dark in the evenings to do much in the garden during the week.

Because I knew that there would likely be a frost, I decided to cut all the fruits I could find on my plants. I got a HUGE pile of green tomatoes:

I’m hoping that at least a few will still ripen to red (one of them is turning already). I’m still on a lookout for a reliable and tasty fried green tomatoes recipe. I’ve never had them, so I want to make sure that I try a good one first.

I also cut 4 peppers– two full-ish sized ones and two small ones that looked like they could be big enough to eat (I left a lot of really tiny ones on the plants):

As you can see, one of them was turning red on the plant, and it was continued to turn since I’ve cut it. I’m glad that I’ll have one last yummy red pepper!