Sounds great to still have tomatoes! We had about 17 degrees the night of October 2nd but pretty good weather since. Here are a couple of ideas:

1. Tomatoes. You can bring them into the house and the green ones should ripen over about a month's time. Some people actually hang the plants in their granage but I haven't tried that. You certainly can cook them up and freeze in various combinations. A single-layer plastic-covered hoop house (I built a 13x32 from a kit for about $800) might give you another month. Make it double layered with a kerosene heater for the cold nights and you might get more.

2. Peppers should freeze well -- just cut them up and put into a bag. Jalapenos freeze well whole.

3. Zucs: cut up, blance for a minute and put into bags and freeze.

You might experiment with greens and other cold-weather vegs that will survive longer. A frost actually helps the tase of some.

You can leave many root crops in the ground and pull them all winter if you keep the ground from freezing.

You can store onions, garlic, and hard squash for the whole winter.

In my experience it's pretty hard to grow much outdoors when the days get short and daytime temps are less than 50 degrees.

P.S. If you happen to be in my neighborhood, could you drop off a few 'maters? ;-)

Timf7,
Thanks for your ideas. Our weather warmed back up almost immediately after I wrote my earlier post, but that night I had gone out and picked many of the still-green peppers, all the small zucchini, and every tomato that showed any pink at all. I brought them all inside and put the tomatoes and peppers on the kitchen table together, for lack of a better idea. A few days later I noticed that all the peppers had turned bright red! I had no idea bell peppers would do this off the vine, like tomatoes will. I wasn't surprised to see the tomatoes turning red, but the peppers were a very pleasant surprise. Aren't tomatoes and peppers related to each other? I wonder if the chemicals the tomatoes exuded helped the peppers turn red? I just might get in the habit of picking my peppers green and letting them turn red inside, now, because it takes so much longer for them to turn red outside. And often they start to rot or are bothered by pests in that awkward period between green and red.

I think I will try cutting down the entire tomato plants and hanging them upside down in my basement, once cold weather really sets in here. I have heard of people doing that with geraniums down here, to overwinter them. Of course I don't expect that will overwinter the tomatoes, but maybe it will let the plant's "juices" flow right on down into the fruit. And I suppose it's as good a place as any to wait for the tomatoes to turn red. Sometimes they rot on my kitchen counter while they are turning color.

Last weekend I saw bou-coups of bees, both honey bees and bumblebees, all over my lima bean plants, so I guess I was wrong about the insects being gone, too. My beans just keep right on producing, in fact they seem to like this cold weather better than anything they've seen so far this year.

I don't think I'll be coming up to Chicago anytime soon, but if you're in Atlanta you're certainly welcome to come and get some tomatoes, green or otherwise.

IN THE NW, BEGINNING ABOUT MID SEPT, WE KEEP PICKING OFF THE BLOSSOMS & ANY TOMATO FRUITS LESS THAN 2/3 SIZE, THEN PUT CLEAR PLASTIC GARMENT BAGS OVER THE TOMATO CAGES (4-6" CLEARANCE AT BOTTOM FOR VENTILATION). THIS ADDS ANOTHER FEW WEEKS & LETS MORE FRUIT RIPEN ON THE BUSHES... PROBABLY SAME THING MIGHT WORK W/ BUSH SQUASH, IF THE LEAVES DON'T MILDEW FIRST... K.

double layers work well. have tomatoes in dec! email for imfo.