David Heiller
I knew there would be trouble when I
saw my breath last Friday evening, June 19. I was hauling woodchips to the garden, working
up a sweat and whoosh, I saw
my breath. Just once, but I saw it. And I hadn’t been eating
onions.
“I’m
seeing things,” I thought. So at bedtime, 10:15, I checked the thermometer just
to be sure I WAS seeing things. I WASN’T seeing things. It read 37 degrees.
I groaned and went to the garage for
the “garden linens.” Old sheets, bedspreads, blankets, tarps, tablecloths. Not
fit for human use, but just fine for chilly tomatoes, peppers, and celery. After
I ran out of blankets, I covered the pumpkins, squash, and melons with
every bucket and pan I could find. The rest could fend for themselves.
The ground
was white with frost the next morning. I
scraped a thin layer of frost from the car windshield with my fingernail. 30
degrees on June 20. If that wasn’t enough, the temperature dipped to 30 the
next night, June 21.
 |
| Sad frost-bitten tomato plant |
The corn and beans got hit the worst.
Their leaves are shriveled up and brown. The squash that didn’t get covered is
done for. The potatoes show a little burn. The rest are OK. At first, I was
outraged that we should get a frost this late. How dare frost damage my hours and hours of hard work! But the more
I talked to people about it, especially older people, the more I almost had to laugh.
That’s what a neighbor, John Filtz,
did. I asked him how his garden has weathered the cold weather. “Ha-ha. What’s
left of it is all right,” he said with a smile in his voice. He mentioned a
similar late frost a few years ago, and how his tomatoes got nipped.
Did you
replant, I asked sadly. “Hell, they were the best tomatoes I ever had,” he said
with another snort. You have to admire an attitude like that. He knows how to
put things in perspective. In the grand scheme of life, death, and baseball, a
frozen garden doesn’t deserve outrage or sadness. Maybe laughter is the best
medicine.
This record frost reminded gardeners
of a few other practical things. Like pay attention to the weather. Gardening
is a lot of physical labor: working the soil, planting, weeding, and harvesting.
From May to October, I love getting my hands dirty with garden soil.
But gardening keeps your other senses
in touch with nature too. Knowing when a frost is coming, even this incredibly
late, is part of a healthy awareness of Mother Nature. When you fail, it’s a hard lesson to learn,
but a good one, an essential one.
Finally: this late frost has given
all gardeners something to talk about, maybe even brag a little. Someday we’ll
be saying to our grandkids that
are worrying about their gardens, “You think this is bad? Why, back in the
summer of ‘92, we had a killer frost on June 21.”
They might not believe you. But they
can look it up.
