From the Gardens Registrar: Frost Approaching?; Seed Information and Seed Saving; Beautiful Photographs on Web Site

Hello Gardeners,

THE F WORD – We’re going to see the temperatures dip down into the 30s tomorrow and Friday evening this week. After that, it looks like it will warm up a bit for a while. But still, this is a good time to start making decisions about the future of your plants. You can divide your vegetables and flowers into three categories – plants that don’t mind a little frost; plants that can’t handle cold temperatures at all; and plants that can get through some frost with help from you. If you have vegetables in the cabbage family – cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts, kale, etc., they should keep living through some chilly nights for a while. Root crops and greens will do fine for a while. Lettuce is the most sensitive of the greens to cold, but a light covering on cold nights (a sheet, for instance) should keep it safe for a few more weeks. But if you have basil and eggplants, prepare to say goodbye. Pick any fruits you still have, and if you have any decent basil leaves left, you can pick that and either use it up fast, or else dry or freeze it. But what about tomatoes and peppers? This is where you have to make a decision. For pepper plants, it’s probably time to either pick the last ones, or else pull up the whole plant, and hang it upside down in a garage or cool room, so that the peppers can mature a little more (for bell peppers), or turn red and dry (for hot peppers.) For tomatoes, if you can easily cover your plants, you can try doing that for a while until we get a hard frost. But cool cloudy days are not going to do much to ripen the fruits you have left. So you might plan to pick the remains pretty soon.

Tomatoes do continue to ripen off the vine, and even green tomatoes can still turn red in your house. Here’s some detailed information about ways to do that (and ways to not do that): https://www.epicgardening.com/how-to-ripen-tomatoes/#:~:text=%20How%20to%20Ripen%20Green%20Tomatoes%20Indoors%E2%80%8B%20,soft%2C%20bruised%2C%20or%20blemished%2C%20separate%20them...%20More%20

Also, there are a lot of ways to use green tomatoes- pickles, chutneys, and of course, breaded and fried. Here’s some recipes, including a cake and a sweet bread: https://www.thespruceeats.com/recipes-using-green-tomatoes-3057091

As for squash, it can be a relief when summer squash plants kick the bucket – mine are way too sprawly to even think of trying to cover them. But winter squash are also sensitive to frost. If it does frost, you’ll still be able to pick your winter squash and pumpkins and eat them, but they won’t keep as long. So consider picking them before you have to. And unfortunately, winter squash are quite subject to theft, so picking them early, and letting them cure inside may be the best plan.

SEEDS – We receive donations of seeds from seed companies, which we then hand out to our gardeners. These are generally seeds that are too old to be sold, but that are still viable. We get free seeds, and the companies get tax write-offs, so everybody wins. We do have a large number of seeds in storage for next year, but it’s possible that we won’t receive as many donations this winter as we usually do. Because of the pandemic, more people have tried gardening this year, both to supplement their food supply, and to give themselves something to do when so many ordinary activities haven’t been available. As a consequence, many seed companies have had a difficult time keeping up with demand.

We’ll just have to wait and see about this, but I encourage everybody to think about saving seeds yourself from some of your plants. Bean seeds are easy enough – if your remaining snap beans have developed big hard seeds, you can keep the pods on the plants until they dry, and then shell them and keep them in containers in a cool dry room. (Of course, you can cook and eat the dry beans too, in soups and stews.) It’s easy to save seeds from flowers like marigolds and zinnias, although these flowers also frequently reseed themselves. But whatever you try to save, make sure it’s an “open-pollinated” rather than a “hybrid” variety. Seeds from hybrids are often sterile, or do not grow into healthy productive plants. Saving seeds is a large topic, but here’s a link to basic information from the University of Minnesota Extension: https://extension.umn.edu/planting-and-growing-guides/saving-vegetable-seeds

BEAUTIFUL PHOTOS ON OUR WEB SITE – One of our gardeners took a large number of excellent photographs of our gardens, and we now have a few of them posted on our home page. Take a look – they’re incredible.

 Happy Gardening and Stay Well,

Kathryn