The Party's Over

Old Man Winter is blowing in.  A drastic drop in temperature from this morning's 60 degrees is expected to come down to freezing some time tonight.  I went out at daybreak this morning to harvest everything left that was harvestable.  The cucumber plant had some heavy cold damage and hadn't been producing anything of any size, but  I picked off whatever fruits were big enough to stick in a pickling jar, and I think I'll throw in the baby carrots I pulled up.

A few days ago I pulled up the lima bean plants and canned or froze the remaining hot peppers and celery.  When I pull up my plants in the fall, they usually come right out.  That serves as all the "tilling" I do.  The roots of the beans and tomatoes this year were amazingly long, so they ripped up a good bit of the surrounding top soil.

"Tilled" soil.

It's looking bare out there now.

Today's harvest that will need some processing was a basket full of green tomatoes, red and green peppers, carrots and baby cucumbers.

But, I also got some things that are edible now: lettuces and volunteer onions.  And pretty little nasturtium flowers.

I found this little gem hiding under the trellis that's supporting my Black Prince volunteer tomato plant.  All the other nasturtiums are solid red-orange.  I left the tomato plant on the trellis and piled up some of the material from the other tomatoes I cut down to see if I can protect it long enough to get some seed on the chance it might produce more of this coloration.

And, speaking of tomatoes, I dismantled the tomato cages today.  That may be my least favorite winter prep chore.  Come to think of it, I don't much like putting them up, either.

I put one of the tomato cages over the remaining two Napa cabbages still growing and piled some of the tomato plant cuttings (pullings, actually) around it in hopes of getting a little more growth out of them.  I also covered the lettuces and tatsoi with lima bean cuttings.  Maybe they'll last a little longer.  If the wind doesn't blow the cuttings away.  We'll see.

Caging the cabbage.

I cut the okra to about a foot tall several weeks back, but I'll leave it in the ground until spring.  It'll be easier to pull once it's dead and the roots have rotted through the winter.  It still had some leaves and a few pretty flowers, along with some gnarly pods.

I also dug up one of the tatsoi plants and potted it.  I've crowded it and some other potted plants around my Julia Child rose bush, caged them all and put plastic over them.  That will protect them for the next few days when the night temperatures get down to freezing.  They'll eventually have to be moved when the day temperatures are also too low, and I don't yet have a plan for what will become of them then. I'm pretty good at procrastination.

Tatsoi in a pot.

I hated to think of what some of the last flowers will look like tomorrow, so I picked some to make a little bouquet and brought them in.

Marigolds, Lavender,  Basil, Okra flowers, and Celery springs

The cypress tree babies that I didn't want to bring in because they're too tall for my cellar set-up, are in pots and need some winter protection.  I dug holes in my compost pile going all the way to the ground level and placed them pots and all in the holes.  Then I put some leaf mulch in the holes and stacked rhubarb cuttings around them.  I hope that will be sufficient to keep them alive this winter.

I'm so excited about my attempts to root some rose cuttings.  Two of the Pink Enchantment cuttings rooted immediately and started growing!  The leaves never even lost their color.

Four out of eleven cuttings rooted, and one has grown some callus, so I'm hoping it will take off shortly.  Callus is undifferentiated cell growth that often forms on plant wounds.  In the case of my cuttings, some of the callus eventually differentiates into roots.  Big time plant culture operations take a few cells from a plant they want to reproduce and grow clones from them in the lab.  Here's a picture of tissue culture showing differentiating callus.  They'll eventually get an entire plant from that little mess.

source: Plant and Soil Sciences eLibrary

In my picture below it's a bit hard to see, but at the bottom of the topmost cutting there's some callus growing, and in the next cutting, there's some callus with roots coming out.  The other stem cuttings didn't make it.  But I'm extra excited because one of the two that did is Shazam!   I only have one small Shazam! rose left out of three I bought last year.  Two died over winter, and the third one is limping.  I don't know if I could buy any more, so I'm excited that I might be able to propagate at least one more this way.

Fingers crossed it thrives.

Bundle up, Mid-Missourians.  We may even have to turn the heat on tonight.

The last of summer.