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WHOA! Nice! I miss winter! 78° here today! 5 days of 70s 1st week of November. Like 1975. What a feeling.
I have work to do
Geez that's warm. I'll be headed out for a week and a half to hunt along the CN border. Gonna be cold the entire time. Right now in Helena we're supposed to get anywhere from 5-12" of snow thru Thursday, which is good we need the moisture. Lake Helena (which I have a view of) has a complete ice sheet- one of the fastest freeze-ups I've witnessed since being here. I actually drove down yesterday afternoon, parked and with my binoculars I could see the ice sheet forming. I picked a reference point and in less than an hour I saw a few yards sheet over. This morning total sheet. Pretty amazing.
We're going to attempt to do some indoor gardening this winter. My husband bought some grow lights and has some vegetables started from seeds. I just dug up my jalapeno plant from the outside garden and put it in a giant pot. It is still producing peppers so it would be nice if I could keep it going.
I actually enjoy cleanup, its therapeutic for me. Especially knowing my pile of leaves goes from this...to that.
I might be stealing some of my neighbour's leaves that they pilled onto the curb. I wanna see if I can keep my compost pile warm all through the winter. Last winter it was only really frozen from mid-Jan to mid-Feb and the fall leaves were broken down into ready to use compost by late May. This time around I'll try to add more nitrogen (coffee shop coffee grounds) and moisture as I think last winter it was deficient in both (in addition to the extra mass from neighbours).
Memph, what do you do with those small green tomatoes? I have about two dozen. This is the first time that this has happened to me.
Friday I picked a small ripening tomato, two very small bell peppers, and two eggplant. This is crazy. Years ago the garden was kicked by mid October.
Yeah, I managed to keep my tomatoes alive up until Monday. Two days later the garden was blanketed in snow and temperatures seem unlikely to rise above 45F until December.
Tomatoes release something called ethylene gas, which acts as a hormone that induces ripening. So you want to basically place your tomatoes in a way that allows ethylene to build up to speed ripening. Some people like to wrap their tomatoes in newspaper to trap the released gas inside. Or maybe put all their tomatoes together in a closed box. I'm leaving my tomatoes on a table in the basement. There's enough of them close together that a fair bit of ethylene will build up even if it's not that much of an enclosed space. And since I have a large quantity I don't want them to ripen that fast because then I'll have more than I can eat all at once.
I have been covering up our turnip greens each night that the temps get down to freezing. They look very bad when I uncover them, but they perk right back up.
Our first real freeze of the fall was evident this morning and it is already time to start planning the early spring garden that will start in only 10 weeks here. The phase of our lives calls for furnishing the seed, plants, fertilizer, irrigation water and land and having a much, much younger couple to the stooping, bending, lifting, etc and we all get to eat well. On the bright side we have already made the arrangement with an eager young couple that has no place to garden and needs the means that we have. On top of the growing side of this equation my wife will teach the young lady about canning, freezing, drying, and preserving in general what is produced as well as ways that we have learned to prepare several lesser known vegetables fresh.
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