Monday, November 19, 2007
Well now I know exactly what really hard frosts do to your garden. Something that I had not really experienced before.
The first victim is the physalis. Laden with unripen fruit, it is now brownish green and flopped over to near ground level. Evidently it really needs much more hot weather than it got this year. All the unripen strawberries also got frozen so have turned to mush. I left them on, maybe they will feed some very hungry bird. I took off the netting from the strawbs to let them do their winter "thang".
Curiously enough the rest seems OK, I dug up some small beets and carrots, which had grown much better than I had expected, and an enormous parsnip, the tip of which broke off in the ground :-( Curried parsnip soup tonight I think.
Biggest One and I set up a wire container for all the leaf mulch I have been collecting. It is about a metre high and about 80 cm wide and we filled it with leaves and the various bits of grass and weed that had dreid up on the paths. I have realized that if I leave all the other things on the ground, the dead grass, dead weeds etc, then the soil underneath seems well protected and crumbly, so I think I will let that all rot over the winter and maybe my ground will be easier to dig up in spring. We also cloched the salads.
cabbages are getting along brolliantly and even the small curly ones seem to have perked up (they got a bit scoffed by birds at one stage).
The first victim is the physalis. Laden with unripen fruit, it is now brownish green and flopped over to near ground level. Evidently it really needs much more hot weather than it got this year. All the unripen strawberries also got frozen so have turned to mush. I left them on, maybe they will feed some very hungry bird. I took off the netting from the strawbs to let them do their winter "thang".
Curiously enough the rest seems OK, I dug up some small beets and carrots, which had grown much better than I had expected, and an enormous parsnip, the tip of which broke off in the ground :-( Curried parsnip soup tonight I think.
Biggest One and I set up a wire container for all the leaf mulch I have been collecting. It is about a metre high and about 80 cm wide and we filled it with leaves and the various bits of grass and weed that had dreid up on the paths. I have realized that if I leave all the other things on the ground, the dead grass, dead weeds etc, then the soil underneath seems well protected and crumbly, so I think I will let that all rot over the winter and maybe my ground will be easier to dig up in spring. We also cloched the salads.
cabbages are getting along brolliantly and even the small curly ones seem to have perked up (they got a bit scoffed by birds at one stage).
Labels: autumn, cabbage, frost, leaves, physalis, strawberry
# posted by antipodesgirl @ 11:55 AM 
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