Garden Journal, End of October Garden Report

Hello, hivers and garden lovers!

It's the evening of the first day of November as I'm writing this. Fall is almost done with and winter is approaching here in Upper Michigan. There's snow falling at the western end of Lake Superior tonight, so it's not too many days away here where I live on the Michigan-Wisconsin border. Our forecast for the week is for temperatures in the 40s F during the day and below freezing at night.

We've been getting frost at night for at least a week now, so most of the plants in the garden are done, including the marigolds. The carrots are still alive, they're fairly frost tolerant, and apparently the borage plants are also frost tolerant, because they're still alive. The only things I have left to do in the garden are digging the carrots, and garden cleanup.

Let's take a look at the garden. This is an overall shot of what's left of my garden now. That borage plant is still nice and green. The frost has hit the marigolds pretty hard, but they're not quite dead yet.

Here's a look at where all the tomato plants were. It's mostly just marigolds now, but there's still a few dead tomato plants to remove. These marigolds are less affected by the frost so far.

The marigolds in the raised bed are not as fortunate. Lots of flowers, but the plants are dying from the cold.

This is my small carrot patch in the raised bed. They seem to be still doing ok with the cold at night.

The forecast for this week is for colder at night than it has been up to now, so I decided to cover the carrots with some sheet plastic to help hold in a bit of ground heat until I can get them harvested. I bought a 9 foot by 12 foot roll of 3 mil plastic this afternoon and covered up the carrots before it got dark. I'll leave the plastic on the carrots until I'm able to harvest them.

I'm hoping to be able to get the carrots dug before the end of the week. I've been taking the past 2 days real easy because I did too much heavy stuff last Friday and my back has been paying me back for it. This happens if I do too much, and I apparently really did too much. I should be able to do some garden work in a couple of days if I take it easy tomorrow as well. Apparently, knowing my limitations, and not exceeding them are 2 different things...

I finished digging the potatoes at the community garden last week, but that's a story for another post.

That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!