Later Fall Update

Since our last post fall has been progressing along.  The trees are changing color, the fields around us have been harvested of their corn, barley and sugar beets, and the weather has turned a bit wetter too.  One of the peculiarities of our location in Idaho is that at this time of year we get pretty remarkable temperature swings, leading to stress for our late season plants.  In the daytime we might be up in the mid-60s with warm sun but at night the temps will fall below freezing.  For awhile the warmth of the sun was still winning out but now it has turned and the chill is penetrating.

Our first sad casualty was our watermelon plant we wrote about previously.  It was going strong, with good-sized fruit that were growing everyday.  The plant did have to prioritize those fruit so the other little baby melons shriveled on the vine.  It all looked great and then this happened:

The cardboard with foil was an attempt to warm the melons sitting on top.

It is amazing how the frost really did burn the leaves.  Once the plant was clearly kaput we decided to harvest the melons since the plant would not be providing any more nutrients to the fruit.  Apparently it is not easy to ripen watermelons off the vine, but we are going to do our best.  The results will be posted soon.

Our crimson sweet watermelons

As with the watermelons the other plants in the garden have been suffering with the frost.  Our tomatoes are down for the season and it looks like our potatoes as well. However, the potatoes are looking good to harvest at this late point in the season.  We'll post about that too soon.

Frosted potatoes before harvest

All this is a good lesson in the importance of starting the plants inside in the spring.  Both the tomatoes and the watermelons were pretty short season varieties and they still ran out of time.  Maybe another two weeks of warmer weather and we would have had a huge harvest of tomatoes and good-sized watermelons.  Next year we will buy those few more weeks by doing the starting and transplanting right.