After the Freeze

What a difference a month makes! In the beginning of November I talked about how great my tomato crop was doing, how excited I was to be on the verge of my best tomatoes ever. All the long range forecasters called for normal to above normal temperatures this winter because the La Nina was crankin' out in the equatorial Pacific. I thought it would be o.k. getting my tomatoes in the ground late with that weather outlook.

For a while it looked really good and as Olivia shoveled her way through her first appreciable snowfall over Thanksgiving in PA, down here the heat was on! But something was lurking far to the north and it was about to surge south as the arctic oscillation would soon show La Nina who's boss.

What is the arctic oscillation you ask?? Well, I call it a crop wrecker for the south and a garden crasher. In reality though, its a weather pattern where air pressure is higher in the polar regions and lower down in the U.S. This oscillation is more noticeable during the winter months and tends to drive cold air farther into the south, despite the effects of La Nina. It fluctuates between positive and negative phases, a negative phase is what sends cold plunging into Florida. Forecasters only predict it 2 weeks in advance, making it hard to tell in November if we're gonna freeze in December.

For the last few weeks, the A.O. has been dipping negative and that's been causing our below normal temps and our 3 mornings in a row below 30 degrees and hard freezes. Tomatoes have no chance of survival with a chill like that and yesterday morning I pulled their remains out of the ground. It only took a matter of hours to destroy what took months to grow. All, however, was not lost as I was able to pick many green tomatoes off the vines before the freeze.

I was going to take a garden break, let winter do what it wants and come back strong in the spring. Something about raking the garden clean and putting in my 8 cabbage seedlings made me want to do more, plow forward in the face of adversity. So, I planted my last remaining beet seeds (2 ten foot rows) and an older pack of bush bean seeds ( 1 ten foot row).