Freeze Frame

I mentioned a couple days ago that we'd had our first light frost of the season. Well, turns out that tiny little frost was enough to put an end to most of our garden produce. As I walked by the garden last night on my way to comb cows and gather eggs, I glanced down and realized the cucumber plants had turned black. Furthermore, the tops of the beans were withered and weird looking, and even some of the corn looked a little worn.

In the raised garden, things were a little worse. The basil: fried. The tomatoes: tops of the plants darkened and withered, and if I so much as sneeze all the tomatoes will fall off a branch. The peppers, pumpkins and zucchini aren't any better off. I gathered what I could from the plants, and hope my two still mostly green pumpkins will continue to ripen on the vine, but otherwise am writing off the garden for the year. I've heard from others it's been a hard year for veggies, and I'm hoping it'll just be one of those "Remember the cold summer of 2008 and how we hardly got any tomatoes?" kind of years. I'm almost looking forward to sitting down in my warm house over the winter with a seed catalog, planning and dreaming about the veggies we'll bring in for 2009, and how we might do things differently.

Here's my last harvest of the season: tons of cherry tomatoes, a few pickling cucumbers, a handful of beans, some zucchini, several unripe banana peppers, one unripe Early Girl tomato and a few unripe (and tiny!) Romas, and of course, the ever-present (for now!) eggs.

Apples harvested over the weekend. Aren't they pretty?