Hard Freeze

[liralen]

For the last couple of evenings, the weather man has been predicting that this morning would bring a hard freeze. 29° F. So it would be good and hard and all the succulent leaves might get damaged. Good for fall colors, really bad for herbs.

So, last night, I scrambled to get everything settled. And when I say "everything" I mean everything.

I pulled all the green onions. I cut all my parsley, mint, garlic chives, and basil. I cut some of the thyme oregano and rosemary as the mother bushes are so huge even if I lost all the leaves that are out, what I cut would suffice for a good long time. All the cut herbs went into the garage fridge. The green onions and parsley went into the regular fridge as we'd use 'em faster. I'll likely do pesto with the basil.

I dug out the sage and put it into its own pot. I dug out a quarter of my garlic chives and put them into a pot, as that was all that would fit. They'd originally all fit into the same pot, but with a summer's growth they've gotten HUGE root systems and are big and fat and happy. John covered the rest of them with six inches of pine mulch, so they should be fine for the winter, even. I threw out the lettuce pot and put the potting soil into my compost.

I took all the herb pots I'd started over the course of the late summer, and put them on trays in the south-facing bedroom. There was rain yesterday, so they were all good and wet, and they've been in their pots long enough a little change of location shouldn't hurt them. The two potted tomatoes came inside. One of them should probably go into the compost, the other, smaller one, is still producing nice, big, red fruit.

John picked all the ripe cucumbers, zucchini, and tomatoes. The zucchini plants were mostly dead, already, so they ended up in the compost. The carrots, which are now HUGE we thought would tide over okay, as we didn't care about their greens.

The evening got colder and darker and windier, but we persisted. Jet came out to help us for a little bit and then he danced around, "I'm COOooooooold." he said and we urged him back in, but he did a great job opening and closing the door for us as we went in and out with things.

After school Jet and I had gone to the grocery store to get food and then to his train store and then to Target and gotten him a Hot Wheels station. I had started Jet's rice soaking before I did the spate of gardening stuff. So when it was good and dark and we'd put blankets over the healthy tomato plants, I started the rice cooker and John helped Jet put his station together while I cooked Coho salmon. John helped grill asparagus and made a salad. We had dinner around 8. Jet ended up wanting a pancake instead of rice, which is fine by me. So he got whole wheat pancakes with apple slices and half a bottle of Odwalla strawberry banana smoothie before he ate his "treat" of a single box of Halloween Dots.

Jet played with his Hot Wheels while we cleaned up, and I knit for a bit and watched Good Eats, which was running a spate of cheese shows, the macaroni and cheese one and the fondue and "grilled" cheese sandwich episode. I liked 'em enough to see them all. Jet likes the shows a lot, too. I'm not sure why, as he normally asks for cartoons whenever we put on a Big People show, but there's enough funkiness to AB that Jet seems to like him a lot.

Of course, it only got down to 37°. Feh. Well, they're calling for 32° tonight, so we'll probably throw the blankets back on for this night, too. It was that time of the year, anyway, and I don't resent the early call to get this all taken care of. Next thing will be clearing out all the watering lines.