Coming of the frost...

Last week the autumn's first hard frost came one night. The end was swift and sudden for the tomato plants. Fundementally, life is composed mostly of water. Plants in general can be looked upon as billions of packets of water held together by thin walls of cellulose. The water pressure applied upon those walls gives the plants shape and structure. When the ambient temperature dipped cruelly below the freezing point, those packets of water turned into razor sharp blades of ice crystal. These crystals stabbed clean through the cellular structure of my tomatos along the entirety of the plants. The final stake was of course to be struck in the morning. With the coming of the sun, the temperature rose above freezing point, thus melting those ice crystals. In a matter of hours, the life blood of my tomato plants leaked out of a billion microscopic cuts. What had been in full bloom the day before was transformed into a dark, shrunken, and collapsing mass of plant matter.

I did my best to salvage the remaining tomatos on the vine. The tomato plants have apparently devoted the last iota of their energy onto their offspring. A dozen tomatos had to be thrown away due to frost damage. A handfull of semi-ripened tomatos went to the fridge, and about 30 still-green tomatos joined their siblings down in my basement cellar to ripen indoors. Of the plants themselves, I promptly proceeded to cut and shred into pieces. This green manure, I applied to the compost bins. What came out of the good earth shall be returned back into it. And the land that the tomatos had occupied was quickly replowed. I threw upon that land a fine layer of my own compost and then proceeded to sow seeds of winter dwarf kale. In the days since the sowing, the kale had been growing like weeds. Dwarf Kale, along with turnip have special enzymes within their cellular structure that serves as a form of anti-freeze. Thus, for all intents and purposes, these plants are nearly immune to the cold weather that we get here in the Northeast.