Living with the mother of all frosts ~ June 25, 1992

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.