Last night we had the first frost of this growing season, over three weeks later than normal. It is so late, in fact, that there was little need to protect anything in the garden since it had all been harvested.
(Family story: When my mother went into the hospital to have me on October 6th her neighbor decided to wait to the next day to pick a bouquet of flowers to take to her. That night the flowers were killed in a frost. Because of this story, I’ve always been aware of that first frost and, if it didn’t occur before my birthday on October 7th I figured we’ve had a long growing season.)
When something like this extra couple of weeks happens it is convient to blame it on global warming and, maybe, it is, but it also could just be a glinch in the weather patterns combined with a little luck. While I can’t recall a year when we went this long without frost, there have been plenty in memory where we’d get a frost during the first week of October and then have three weeks of 60-degree weather into November.
Then too, this late frost may be because I planned ahead last spring and created a “tomato house” to give my tomatoes and peppers a headstart in the spring and protect them against an early frost. It wasn’t necessary to use this protection since the tomatoes were done bearing a week or two ago and all I needed to do was get the last of the peppers picked–about a peck. So maybe my preplanning caused the gods to delay the frost–lets hope it works next year as well.
