This weekend we had our first freeze. It wasn’t hard enough to kill off the hardy perennials or the cool weather veggies, but my tender crops had to be harvested. My daughter picked two boxes of tomatoes, I got about 5 quarts of stewed tomatoes and a full box of nice, big beautiful green tomatoes….I am still contemplating their use.

We also dug up the potatoes. I have been really excited about these. This is the first year we have grown potatoes. Dadzoo made a 4×8 foot planter box that was 14 inches deep. We planted mostly good ol‘ russets and a few fancy varieties that my Dad gave to me , (he is know for his fancy varieties)…….I don’t know the names, but they were small finger potatoes, the white ones having a pretty pink hue and, to my children’s delight, purple potatoes!

We got about two full boxes of potatoes. I was hoping for more, next year we will plan a little bit earlier and Dadzoo is going to make the bed deeper.

I also harvested my onions. We got about 30 nice big onions and several smaller ones. We will be doing these again next year.

My winter squash and pumpkins were a big disappointment. This is all we got for the 10 plants we planted. I had major problems with squash bugs and they just didn’t do well. We will try again next year!

The pretty greeny/gray pumpkins are called Queensland blue, aren’t they pretty and different! Then we have a white pumpkin called….well I can’t remember…..but it is suppose to be white, kind of fun and different. Then we have a good old butter nut squash!

I didn’t have any summer squash to harvest, they finally succumbed to the dreaded squash bug early in September…well really I finally gave up battling that stupid bug!…grrrr…..

Dadzoo parent also gave us two boxes of these beautiful red apples off their tree. I am going to store them in the basement for eating, I am so done with canning apples this year! They are really sweet and crisp, they will be good for eating in the next few months.

It was a good thing we got the tender veggies in, this is what we woke up to Sunday morning (we didn’t get as much snow as some people did, which is pretty typical in our little micro climate) but it made for a frosty cold morning. That night we had our freeze, it was in the high 20’s. The ground is still warm so the cold nipped a lot of things, but left enough of the hardier plants to make for a beautiful Indian Summer.

Despite the snow my roses are still blooming their little hearts out now that it has warmed up a bit. Last year I had blooms in my garden on Thanksgiving Day.