Freeze...

Friday and Saturday nights had frost advisories issued by the National Weather Service. Saturday morning I checked on the plants, and they were doing great! No damage at all. Sunday afternoon I checked on them and found that pretty much everything had succumbed during the night. :( The adjoining community garden had similar issues. Everyone knew the cold weather was coming and prepared their plants as best they could, to no avail. Word in the garden is that it got down to 28 degrees last night. To me, that is a bit more like a freeze rather than a frost. The lone survivors in our beds seem to be a cinnamon basil, and the two squash. One of the tomatoes *might* make it, but it will probably take a while to recover from the damage. We are probably just going to put it out of its misery instead.

The sunflowers seem to be made of much hardier stock, as they seemed completely unfazed by the chilly weather. They do need to be thinned out a bit.

Still no signs of sprouting from the beans. Good thing considering the weather.

So, I promised photos of the boulders and here I deliver. They don't look like much in the photo, but the large one on the left is actually about 5' tall. I'll try to take overview photos from this same spot

every so often, so that we can look back and see how much has changed. Hopefully one of the things that will change are those blackberry brambles along the fence. They desperately need to be pruned back... Another job for another day.

Rachel

Frost?!

Turns out the girl scouts didn't have time to completely fill the last two raised beds. So, I joined my friends Michele and Holly there on Thursday to top them off. It was really nice to be able to get some exercise and adult conversation at the same time. All of us have kids around the same age, so while we were shoveling and talking, the kids were roaming the property. They made beds in the tall grass, slid down the hillside, played chase, and pretended they were princesses and monsters... among other things I'm sure. The sword-fights with the kiddie rakes we did put a stop to. After mostly filling the beds with compost, we screened some fill dirt and topped the beds with it. Around then the kids started complaining about being hungry, and we realized that it was dinnertime already! We'll lightly mix the dirt and compost together at a later date.

We had another pledge to donate $100!! A big thanks goes out to David and Li Collier! Like I said before, if anyone would like to match that, we'll take what we can get. Checks can be made out to The Siskiyou Arboretum, with a note to earmark the money for the children's garden. Mail them to PO Box 36, Yreka, CA 96097. Thanks again David and Li!

All day today I had been noticing how chilly it has been. Didn't even get up into the 50s. When I finally got around to checking to see what the low would be tonight, I found that we have a frost advisory both tonight and tomorrow night. We still have the row covers for the raised beds at the garden, so I drove on down there and covered both rows again. Hopefully it will be enough. All of the community garden beds that had frost sensitive plants had been covered up with whatever people could find... cardboard, empty pots, and plastic. Someone's bed had tomatoes and peppers that weren't covered, so I scrounged around and found some empty pots to put over them. Keep your fingers crosses that we don't lose any more plants!

There is a garden clean-up day on Sunday at 1pm if you're interested in helping out. Bring gloves, trash bags, and a truck if you have one. See you there!

Rachel