My grandchildren have been picking squash, peppers, and green beans today. It looks like we are good for a few more days so we left a few green tomatoes and squash.

We have a bunch of cold hardy stuff growing.

We had a light frost here this morning but you couldn't tell by afternoon. I don't think it hurt anything. I guess our first freeze will be late this year. I was looking back at last years notes and we had 2" of SNOW on the 16th Nov. who knows we may get that this year, hope not.!!!

Johnny, How long is it before y'all typically drop below 20 degrees? When I grow cold-hardy stuff over the winter, generally I see damage on most things when temperatures start hitting the teens. (Not necessarily on kale, collards and spinach when in the teens though.) Of course, it depends on how much cold we've already had and on how well-hardened the plants already are (or aren't) to cold weather.

I still have lots of warm-season stuff. Even tomatoes and peppers continue to flower and set fruit at least as recently as last week. I don't expect the tiny new tomatoes or peppers will get a chance to make much growth before a frost or freeze gets them though. We even have some new watermelons the size of a walnut. Obviously they won't live much longer either, but the one that's about the size of a volleyball might be almost mature enough to harvest in the next couple of days.

The only things I have in the garden now that might make it through the winter, though, are rosemary, fennel and parsley.

I need to do a lot of clean-up and soil enrichment with compost before the winter El Nino rains start up. The flooding and subsequent drought were hard on the soil in my raised beds. November and December are my time to work on the soil before the real rain arrives. (We've had 12-13" of rainfall in about the last month, so I use the term real rain loosely, grin.)

Our coldest night here lately has been 40, but our mesonet station has hit 38. I know the first frost is coming soon, but maybe not this week.

In the meantime, the wind may blow us all away on Wednesday, and the further north you are, the harder it is expected to blow.

Click on "Windy Wednesday" on this page for wind forecast

Dawn,

I guess you could say I'm a gambler when gardening. We are just about to pick a few hundred pounds of collards, mustard, squash, turnips and kale. We will remove one leaf from MANY plants so they will continue to grow. My theory on cool weather crops is simple. Plant 'em and cross your fingers. One thing is for sure, if we don't plant them, they won't grow.

The ladies at the senior feeding facilities LOVE our fresh greens. This last Feb. 15 we planted more than a few hundred row feet of cool season crops. The beets, kale, turnips and carrots were great. We planted them in raised rows about 8" high. I think that is the most important thing we have learned. Raised rows RULE for many reasons.

Here is a picture of the tool we use (row hipper) to make the raised rows. Ours is home made. It ain't so pretty.

I hauled 16 tons of stall muck in the last few days. I'll spread it tomorrow. Wednesday, we'll plow it under. This is our soil building period too.

December and January are the coldest months for us.

Greens

Johnny

Vision-Farms.org

Our place had frost on November 8 and 9, but so far it hasn't been a real strong killing frost. Still, warm weather crop production is pretty much over.

Johnny, I'd rather gamble with plants than with money. : ) Other than with gardening, I am not a gambler.

You never know when we'll have a warm winter and your cool-season plants might not freeze at all. Even if they freeze, they often bounce right back anyway so they're only set back for a week or two.

I agree raised rows rule. They're the only way to go. Most of mine are permanent raised beds since I have just a home garden that is worked mostly by hand, and not by tractor. Also, we slope every which way here in our creek hollow, so the wooden planks that edge our raised beds help prevent erosion. If we had flat land, I could have just raised rows plowed up every year, but since we slope, I opted for a more permanent solution.

One thing we have learned in past years, and especially this year, is that each raised bed serves as a dam to hold water in the pathways, so that kinda works out. The current plants are above the water and won't drown, and the water very slowly soaks in and feeds whatever raised beds are downhill from the water that sits in the path. This year, water sat in the pathways for all of May and June and part of July, with the beds/paths functioning sort of like contour plowing to hold the water and soil in place.

That's a lot of muck to haul and spread. I'm glad you have some farm equipment. Can you imagine doing it all by hand??? Oh, I think the row hipper/ripper looks like a fine tool. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Dawn

Dawn,

I too am a big fan of contour plowing. My lister planter is great for contour planting because it creates a furrow about four inches deep, then plants the seed in the bottom of the furrow. When we get a short downpour, the water is slowed by the ridges. More water soaks in rather than just running to the creek.

No, I can not imagine moving 16 tons of stall muck by hand.

Johnny

Most of the land here, including ours, was contour plowed when it was farmland and even though there's not hardly any farming here now, just mostly ranching or transplanted city slickers like us on small acreage, the contouring remains. I love seeing how the ridges hold the water in the swales for days or even weeks after rainfall, and the contours channel water in heavy rainfall to reduce erosion. It is amazing that soil contouring done decades ago still helps preserve the land today. Sometimes when city folks like us move onto contoured land, we have to flatten out portions of the contouring to make a level spot to build a house and driveway, but most of us leave the contours alone otherwise so they can continue to channel the rainfall the way they were meant to.

One of our neighbors had such a persistent wet spot in his very long (maybe 600 to 800' long, I don't know for sure) gravel driveway that we all thought he had a spring there. After a while though, he figured out some contouring in the pasture was channeling water to that specific part of his driveway. Rather than ruining the contouring and the way it controlled the flow of the water across his land, he had a guy put a big culvert type drainpipe (tinhorn is what they're called here) right underneath the middle of his driveway where the contour was. Now the water channeled by the contour just flows under his driveway and into a new pond built specifically to catch and hold that water. Now his driveway no longer sits partially underwater during heavy rainfall and he has a pond that provides water for all kinds of wildlife.

Dawn,

I enjoyed your story about terracing. Nothing better than making lemonade from lemons.

The stress our population is placing on the available fresh water resources is unsustainable. There is an old concept I have recently discovered that makes a lot of sense to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/.../Seven_generation_sustainability

Johnny