Monday, August 10, 2009

Frost damage on August 9th ??!!!!

Holy cow! Got home Sunday evening from a weekend absence; went out into the garden to check up on stuff, and found frost damage on many squash leaves and a row of beans! What a shock & surprise that was! This is a first for my summers in this area - to have to be concerned about frost damage (thus, no output) this soon. Usually I wouldn't think about it a lot until early September.

I think a harbinger of this has been the cool nights we've had much of the summer; very few nights in the 50's, most in the 40's. And not high 40's either - many low 40's.

The photo to the right is of one of my summer squash with the frost-damaged leaves.

Everything else, except the one row of bush beans shown left, looks OK. At this point I don't know how much impact this will have on production. There are still lots of good, intact squash leaves; not sure the same can be said of the row of beans. They had just started producing small beans; this cold bout may slow that process down enough that production of fully grown beans won't happen.
Plus it takes a while for the plants to recover in the morning from such cool nights; that too will slow production.
The low temperature at our house August 9 (yesterday morning) was 36.5, this morning the low was 37.5. I suspect the actual low temperature 150' away (from the outdoor thermometer) in the vegetable garden was a little lower.

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