Just a quick mention of this year’s GAGG. It is happening on October 3rd. Mark your calendars. See this newsletter for more details.
This Week’s Challenge
I’m not sure which is worse, a forecast of frost without any frost or frost. This past week we had the former. The forecast for the Twin Cities area called for patchy frost and history has shown that patchy means Fresh Earth Farms. We are always in the patch due to our being in a small valley. All the cold air sinks into the valley and we get frost. But not this past week. I’m not sure where the patch was. I heard of a few temps in the 30’s but we never got below 40.
As a farmer I check out a lot of weather forecasts. Sometimes I feel like I look at ever TV station’s forecast to find the one I like the best. But actually I’m looking for the types of information that they mention in passing. Things like calm winds, the lack of cloud cover, dew points in the 30s, even full moon. These are the things that indicate frost in my book. You can have a low temp forecast for the twin cities in the low 40s and we can have frost out here in the exurban area, if the wind is calm (can the wind be calm? If it is calm isn’t there no wind and therefore there is nothing to be called calm?) and there is no cloud cover. Add a full moon and it is almost guaranteed. Even a slight breeze of 5 mph can stir up the air enough to prevent a frost. So can high, wispy clouds. But if you have high clouds and a full moon the slight amount of energy the moon delivers to the high clouds can be enough to dissipate them and then we have frost.
So last week when they forcasted frost — and by they I mean every local TV station plus the National Weather Service — I figured they must be right. But a part of me wondered about this particular forecast. They not only had patchy frost but also patchy fog. Fog is like a blanket keeping the earth warm. It is a low level cloud. So can you have fog and frost? I suppose if the ground is cold enough and the dew point is low enough but at this time of year the ground is pretty warm. For frost to form there has to be enough heat radiating from the surface for it to cool. With a layer of fog over the earth I couldn’t imagine it happening. But weather forecasters are professionals so who am I to question them?
What happened you ask? Fog, no frost — just as I suspected. Now maybe there were frost patches and fog patches and we happened to be in the fog patch. It makes sense in hindsight. With our farm being a low spot, fog occurs here more often than the surrounding areas. So I surmise that the air temp cooled to the dew point. This created fog in our valley area. This fog acted like a blanket and prevented the ground from radiating heat and cooling enough to create frost. I could imagine a spot on the top of a hill where the fog did not form getting cold enough for frost to form. I’m not sure it happened but it seems possible. Anyone have frost last week?
In any case, with the forecast of frost we went into frost mode. This is where we try to save any frost sensitive plants we can and harvest the veggies from those we can’t. Since the temperature forecast wasn’t too cold we did not concern ourselves with the hoop house. We figured it would stay warm enough for the tomatoes to continue growing. We harvested all the outdoor cherry tomatoes — both ripe and unripe. The plants were succumbing to plant diseases so they weren’t going to last much longer anyway. We also picked all the outdoor hot peppers, again both ripe and unripe. With the sweet peppers we harvested the larger peppers and then used the sprinklers to keep the plants from freezing. This was a hedge your bets strategy. If the sprinklers worked the peppers would survive and the smaller peppers left on the plants would continue to grow. If the sprinklers failed to keep the plants alive at least we got the biggest. So we moved the sprinklers to the peppers and tested them to make sure they covered the peppers.
The next and biggest task was what to do about all the beans. We have a lot of beans that were both ready to pick and would soon be ready to pick if we kept the plants alive. We have some row covers — long, thin, spun cloth fabric to use like a blanket — that we could put on but not enough to cover 900 feet of beans. So we spent a considerable amount of time harvesting as many as we could — with the help of one of our member volunteers. Thanks Judy! We picked enough of the beans to limit the beans left to approximately the length of the row covers we had. We then covered the plants and hoped for a dead clam night so the covers wouldn’t blow away. All this was done with cold rain falling for most of the afternoon and into the evening. We got done around 7:30 that night — around sunset. It was a long cold day but we figured it was worth it to save everything from the frost. I also got up at 1:00 in the morning to turn on the sprinklers to keep the pepper plants from freezing.
The next morning when I awoke there was a lot of fog but no frost. Looking out it didn’t look like there was any frost. I wasn’t sure if I should be happy or angry. I was glad we didn’t lose anything to frost but I was also not happy that we did everything we did for no good reason — unless of course it frosted the second night. Nope. Even warmer temps the second night they forecasted patchy frost. I think this is the first time I can remember a forecast of patchy frost and not being one of the patches.
Looking at this week’s forecast the weather service is forecasting patchy frost Wednesday night into Thursday for the county to the east of us. Uhg.
What are we going to have this week?
We have a lot of different stuff but not a lot of any one thing to give to everyone except for beans, garlic and onions (sorry about the small onions. The onions seemed to vary considerably in size this season and unfortunately that includes smaller ones). We have a reasonable amount of potatoes however unfortunately today (Tuesday) the carrot harvest wasn’t as productive as we hoped based on how the carrots looked above ground. We also have some cucumbers, tomatoes, tomatillos, a few cherry tomatoes, a few cabbages. a few Napa cabbages, and very few broccoli. We are hoping the broccoli and Napas start coming on stronger by next week.
It is also a fruit, egg, coffee, flower and double jam week. Why double jam? We decided to get both September and October jams this month so we might as well send them out to you. They were short of black raspberry jam and couldn’t make anymore so we substituted blueberry. Also this may be the last week for flower bouquets. We still have glads to harvest but most of the other flowers are pretty unproductive.
That seems like more than enough for this week. I’ll save anything else of interest for next week. As always, let me know if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, etc.