Last week felt summer-like, with temps creeping into the low eighties. That ended abruptly when a cold front swooped in, dumping nearly four and a half inches of rain. Behind that: frost.
Yesterday afternoon, Barry and I anxiously eyed the four-foot-high stalks in the new garden bed we planted a year ago. Normally, we’d harvest them at about ten to twelve inches, but new asparagus plantings shouldn’t be cut until the third year to allow them to get established. If the cold nips them, the spears will re-emerge—but it weakens the plants. Throwing a blanket over them will bend and break the thin shoots.
We waxed creative, and the resulting cartoonish spectacle functioned well. Overturned five-gallon buckets easily protected the smaller plants. We placed tall tomato cages over the big ones and draped them with old sheets and trash bags. This morning . . . Voilà! Complete survival.
My love of gardening springs from my grandmother, born 126 years ago today. She lived in a tiny house on a steep hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. With no room for a traditional garden, she lined rows of big flower pots on her red-brick patio and filled them with soil.
“Let’s grow a salad patch,” she said to five-year-old me. At the hardware store, I picked out envelopes with pictures of carrots, radishes, and bunching onions. She added a package of leaf lettuce seed, and we were off to the races.
We planted, watered, and waited. I visited several times weekly and, finally, little green seedlings emerged. I grew increasingly excited as they matured into yummy vegetables. I’ll never forget that first, homegrown, garden salad.
Top photos by Barry Benson; I snapped the bottom photo during a visit to my grandmother’s marker in the family’s Minnesota cemetery plot.
#asparagusseason #frost #gardenhacks
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