Y’all. I feel so stupid.
We had a few really cold days at the end of October through the first of November. Lows in the 20s – just off a spate of warm fall days. I thought my chard would be ok. I thought the lettuce would be fine. Peas? They can hack it.
No. Wrong, Friday. Wrong.
They froze.
Before the carnage, and what felt too early, Eric had put up a poly house for me. I am so grateful that he did: it kept my tender seedlings happy through the arctic plunge! Enough so that I could restart a lettuce bed, and we had some rainbow chard seedlings that kept tucked away and are now ready to be put in a properly covered bed.
Eric never fails to impress me. The instructions said it took 3 people. He did it on his own. 🙂
I think I’m pretty dejected about the garden at the moment. I had to BUY LETTUCE and spinach this week so we could have salad. Buy lettuce. BUY LETTUCE!!! How absurd. Like a peasant. 🙂
But I think we will have a decent lettuce bed ready in a few weeks, and I have more winter tolerant seeds started. I like to buy lettuce seeds from Territorial in Oregon. When I raised a lettuce garden on the front driveway during the Oregon years, all the seed came from Territorial and it grew like crazy. We had lettuce year round.
Those years in Oregon were tough – growing lettuce on the front driveway, just feet away from the public sidewalk. FEET, I say. People would stop and look around, walk into my garden, ask questions. One day I found a neighbor actually in the driveway garden, sampling tender new leaves! These are reaaaaly good! What are they? she said with a mouthful of lettuce leaves. I love colorful, bold people like this. They just tickle me.
What made this driveway garden especially challenging was when the small town would host the largest fireworks display in the state – we got descended upon for 2-3 days because we lived in the township itself and people would park and walk to the river festivities nearby. It was a lettuce garden openhouse.
I didn’t mind the questions and curiosity. I am a bit of a Johnny Appleseed – except I guess I am Friday LettuceGrower. I think our beloved country would be stronger if we all grew our own little lettuce patches.
We ate the first of the first volunteer butternut squash this past week. It was sooooo orange! Appropriate for a VOL squash – go Vols! And it was so luxurious, roasted, with other winter veggies. And also the little Kaffir lime that I baby is doing well in the house. She was full of limes, so I took them off and preserved them in salt for future curries. I think it just might work. Kaffir lime is apparently really rare so finding info on what to do with a tree’s fruit is almost non-existent. Oh and there was a ladybug on it.
The cold weather made it super cozy to sit down with my new old tea pot and the warming stand. It’s super awesome. Oh and we picked up butter from a local market that orders for customers before they close for the winter. I thought it was super cute that the sweet young woman who works there marked our box with “eric and friday” – I have no idea how she knew our names.
We’ve always been “eric and friday”. I guess it’s because we never had children – it’s just the two of us. And we tend to go everywhere together. When we lived Hawaii, people would ask us if we worked the same shift together because of this. Cute. They didn’t know we were titans of our tiny industry. (yea, right) I really miss those years of working together.