I just have to figure out what I'm going to do with the 5 bushels of green tomatoes we picked yesterday.

They say its going to get down to 30 here in Durant on Saturday night, so looks like I will have to go pick some winter squash. However, that also looks like the only night it might get below freezing in the next 10 days, and we live at the top of a hill, so I am going to keep my fingers crossed!

Frost and freezing temperatures are inevitable, you know. I hate seeing the first frost too, but more because I'll miss the warm-season flowers that still are in bloom. I don't miss the veggies as much, likely because I've already got so many of them preserved, and big bowls of fresh tomatoes and fresh peppers sitting on the kitchen counter, so I don't feel deprived of them yet. By mid-December, we'll be missing them though.

I'll strip the tomato and pepper plants of their final fruit on Saturday morning---anything large enough to be useful, and will harvest what is likely to be the last of the fresh basil, parsley, sage and fennel. I doubt we'll escape freezing on Sat night/Sun morning since we're in a low-lying area. I might even cut the last zinnias, verbena bonariensis and Laura Bush petunias on Saturday and bring in a big bouquet to enjoy since they're going to freeze anyway.

I guess this means moving the potted fruit trees, herbs and ornamentals into the greenhouse to overwinter. It's almost Thanksgiving. It's time. For us, even if it arrives Sat/Sun, the first freeze is, statistically speaking, a little late. I've been trying to enjoy having everything green, fruitful, flowering, etc., while it has lasted, and most trees here still have most or all of their leaves, and lots of the leaves are still green. We need for those leaves to fall before snow or sleet sneaks in and lands on all those leaves and brings down limbs and trees.

Robert, I have a few ideas for you: fried green tomatoes, green tomato jam, baked green tomatoes, green tomato chutney, green tomato relish, green tomato and yogurt soup, green tomato bread, green tomato cake, green tomato pie, grilled green tomatoes Caprese, sweet green tomato cornmeal muffins, etc. There's a lot of ways to use them up. It just depends on whether you want to fry, grill, bake, jelly or can.

Dawn

Dawn, I'll have to see what kind of recipes some of those entail. But 5 bushels worth, I don't think so. If I just let some ripen, it will be as bland as a store bought one.

I think we will do some relish.

How will a frost like this affect greens like chard and lettuce, as well as other vegetables like brocolli, fennel, and carrots?

Probably not much. I would not worry about this until it gets into the low 20's.

I have picked most everything from my garden and started the cleaning process. We drove to SE Kansas this morning and I noticed a lot of places that looked like they had already had a freeze or very heavy frost. Even just 2 miles from our house, banana plants had already turned brown while mine are still green. They are pretty shredded by the high winds, but not yet frozen down, but are in a sheltered southern location. My garden is less protected and most of it has had frost. It's over for the season except for cleaning. Our 4 inches of rain in 2 days should make things easy to pull out of the ground.

Yep, it's going to freeze. Can't stop winter. I just hate to see my flowers wilt and die.

Robert - let me recommend the tomatoe relish recipe found on all recipes dot com. We've already has a freeze in some of our micro-climates here. A friend picked all of her green tomatoes but since this is new for her, had no idea what to do with them. Of course, I took them off her hands! (my vines are long dead) I had 10 lbs. I made the relish and a salsa verde. The relish is delish and the salsa - well, it'll be good in soups and casseroles. She grew, I processed and then we split the end results! I won't be buying sweet relish all winter!

I have green tomato's but it has already come one big frost and two light ones and bit the leaves I am afraid it may have ruined the green tomato's.

Robert, I agree that any that ripen this late are hardly worth picking, especially if you've had enough rain to water down the flavor as it is.

I've been using recently picked tomatoes, watered down by tremedous rainfall this last month, in soups, adding sun dried tomatoes and tomato paste to thicken up the soup and to give it more flavor, cause these late-season tomatoes are barely worth picking, but we all know tomato lovers cannot turn their back on potentially usable tomatoes late in the season, even if their flavor is bland. It sure makes the first tomato harvest of the 2016 season seem centuries away instead of only mere months. Mere months during which you cannot find anything in any store that even somewhat resembles a home-grown tomato.

Jmichigan, Most cool-season veggies can tolerate temperatures down close to 20-22, and spinach, kale and chard have gone undamaged (sometimes) in my garden even at 18 degrees. Much depends on prior cold exposure because each time the veggies are exposed to a little bit of cold, they toughen up and develop a little bit of cold tolerance. So, folks in northern OK who likely have already had temperatures at or slightly below freezing may have less trouble with their veggies getting cold damage than those in southern OK where we haven't been close to freezing yet. There's other variables in play as well: veggies in moist soil often tolerate cold better than those in dry soil, and wind (or lack of such) as well as microclimate and elevation (warm air rises, so plants in higher locations often suffer less than those in lower locations) play a role as well. Often, if you can throw a textile fabric over the plants on a night that threatens to be colder than they can tolerate, using that textile to hold in heat that accumulates during the day, you can get them through a cold night with no damage. When I use row cover type frost blankets for that purpose, I like to toss them over the plants in the afternoon before the sun has started to sink too low in the west. Getting them covered while the ground is still warm at 2 or 3 pm helps hold in more heat than covering them up when it is already 6 pm and the ground has cooled off some.

In the winter of 2012-13, my winter veggies made it all the way through Nov, Dec, Jan and part of Feb before we dropped into the teens and they were damaged. Some froze to the ground, some only had freeze damage, but almost all of them regrew new foliage starting within just a day or two. That was a short cold snap. If the cold had been more prolonged, there wouldn't have been much regrowth.

Auther, It probably has damaged them, but not always. If they are damaged, you should see discoloration or mushy spots developing. I've been surprised some years to see green tomatoes show little to no damage if we had patchy frost for a brief period. The longer the frost or the colder the temperature, the more likely the damage. With a hard freeze (28 degrees), the tomatoes usually are ruined.

Dawn

I had several bell peppers that were still green or just trying to turn color. My wife put them in a brown paper sack and left them a few days and they turned color and taste and look ripe. I knew tomatoes would do this but didn't know bell peppers would.

I did this with my pepper plants last week. It worked well. The last of them are reddening up right now.

I have pulled Cayenne peppers before and let them hang in a shed and let them dry completely and made cayenne pepper flake out of them. Just like store bought.

We've had a number of frosts in the last two weeks. But yesterday my wife and I were out in the garden and found a whole lot of peppers, hiding in the foliage. They were in good shape too.

Today I hope to finally finish digging sweet potatoes. It's been a bad year, for sweet potatoes. I believe the climate was good for them. But we had a HUGE rat problem. I will have dug maybe 40-50 lb of usable roots, in the area which should have yielded 400-500 lb. I may even have lost a variety.

George
Tahlequah, OK

We live in the middle of pasture. We have rats and mice all the time. I can not use poison because of the dog and cat. I keep traps set all the time in and around the house/yard/garden areas. It helps. Of course the cat helps. And believe it or not the dog likes to hunt rats. Oh and now I have 2 fridge crispers packed full of peppers and more in the dehydrator. I have 2 more sacks to dehydrate when these get done. And every year I trim a pepper plant near the ground, yank it and trim the roots, pot it and bring it in. Most years they will make it until spring. The overwintered plants usually seem to make a bigger harvest than the 1st year plants. So I did that to. I think I will go get some sage picked now while the kids are sleeping.

We are still eating ripening tomatoes, but they are about gone. But how awesome is it that I just cleaned the garden a couple weeks ago, I turn around, and it is almost time to start seeds again.? Well in a couple months. But that gets closer every day and is coming fast!

My Asian greens and brassica survived 26* last night. I think the ground was still pretty warm. I fear tonight might be another story.

yep still eating ripening tomatoes here also. Been out gathering scion wood for grafting next spring. Gardening never ends , even in the winter.

I haven't even cleaned out my garden yet. It has been too hectic here, and the first freeze was not all that long ago. I froze the very last of the tomatoes that we harvested on the day before the first freeze and will use them in cooking all winter. We did have fresh tomatoes well into December though, so the last BLT sandwich of the season was almost as cherished as the first of the season since we knew it would be the last sandwich with fresh tomatoes for a while. I have been cooking with dried and frozen tomatoes a lot in recent weeks.

We have been busy, on and off, with fire department stuff....sometimes fires or wrecks, sometimes just lots of fall/winter community events the firefighters are involved in, and lately, too many firefighter funerals.

My current plan is to work on garden cleanup the week after Christmas.

With new garden catalogs arriving every week, I already have most of my garden planning and seed acquisition done. I haven't had to buy many new seeds yet for 2016 because I have so many left from 2015 (blame it on the rain). I'm just waiting for a couple of seed varieties I want to clear germination testing and then I'll do my Southern Exposure Seed Exchange order and that may be my last seed order in preparation for 2016.

Down here, the stores go from Christmas displays to the early seeds, bulbs, tubers and corms, and seed-starting supplies, shortly after Christmas, so before too long, the stores here will stop looking like Christmas and start looking like spring. I know for a fact that St. Nick is bringing me some seeds for Christmas, which will make me want to set up the light shelf and start getting ready to grow seedlings under lights.

Dawn

I feel so jealous, I messed around and didn't pick the last few tomatoes that were still on the vine and it frosted on them before I thought it would so lost them.

Okiedawn, how do you freeze your tomato's?

It is so simple. I wash them and lay them out on towels to dry. When they are dry, I pop them into a gallon-sized zip-lock freezer bag and toss them into the deep freeze. I usually end up with 8 to 10 gallons of frozen tomatoes at the very least. I don't always fill up a bag in one day, but what I do is just keep adding more tomatoes to the current unfilled bag until it is completely full. Later on, when I want to use them for cooking, I take the bag out of the freezer and put the entire tomato-filled bag in a bowl on the counter to thaw out. Once the tomatoes have thawed, you can pour them out of the bag and into the bowl. To remove the skin, just pick up a tomato and squeeze it gently and the skin slips right off. I use these once-frozen tomatoes all winter long to make soups, stews and even chili. We have a tomato-based soup every week in the tomato off-season.

Another way to use them is to wash and dry them, then slice them. Lay the slices in a single layer on a cookie sheet covered with wax paper and put them into the freezer to freeze. Once your slices have frozen solid, remove them from the freezer. I like to stack them up in a plastic freezer container, with squares of waxed or parchment paper in between each slice so they don't stick together. To use them for BLTs in the winter months, remove the slices from the freezer and only let them thaw out halfway while you're cooking your bacon to make BLTs or, in my husband's case, BOLTs with sliced onions added. Once you get used to eating your sliced tomatoes half-frozen on a BLT, they're pretty enjoyable. Of course, they are not the same as a BLT made in-season with fresh home-grown tomatoes, but they aren't bad. At least they taste like tomatoes, which is more than I can say for those reddish-orange roundish-squareish, poorly flavored, mushy thingies that they sell in the store as "tomatoes" in the winter time. You also can take the frozen sliced tomatoes, bread them while still frozen, fry them and make fried green (or red )tomatoes in winter. Put them on a BLT for a different twist....a fried green (or red) tomato bacon-lettuce tomato sandwich.

I also like to dry tomato slices in my dehydrator and store them for winter. We use them in recipes that call for sun-dried tomatoes, though ours are not actually sun-dried (and neither are most of the tomatoes sold as sun-dried tomatoes).

Dawn

Okiedawn,

Thank you.

Authereray,

You're welcome.

Dawn

Seed displays have been out for a week at the Tulsa area Lowes and Home Depot. I'm going all heirloom this year so I can start trying to save seeds. Also I have 4 new fruit trees coming FedEx today. Christmas day im planting the trees. Merry Christmas to me!