Frost Has Lost Its Teeth
Before I get started on this shapeless topic, can anyone explain to me in a way that I can understand: why does frost settle on the grass when the air temperature only goes down to 41 degrees? Is the air on the ground colder? Water doesn't freeze at 41 degrees so clearly something is going on right there at the ground. Jon tried to explain it to me but I still do not get it. I thought the ground held its temperature much more solidly than the air does.
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Way back in the olden days when I didn't even have a calendar, there were mile markers that were recognizable and repeated. Birthdays, Christmas, end of the school year, beginning of the school year, frost.
In my old age, only birthdays have held firm. The other milestones have vanished for me. The one that is the most disorienting, actually, is frost.
I can explain why frost is no longer a reliable marker of anything by recognizing that what we grow has changed so much since I was little -- we grow so many crops that are immune to frost that we barely notice it when it comes.
Back in the old days, there was a mad, arduous scramble to rescue every last perishable crop on the day before the frost. We picked every tomato of every color -- from hard green all the way to ripe. Then we wrapped the green ones in newspaper so they would ripen and stashed them in the basement. One time Ellen and I decided to pull all the bean plants and pile them into a pickup truck for later picking because the beans were so gorgeous and we couldn't pick them fast enough. (It ended up not being the best idea -- not much fun to pick beans from wilted plants that are piled in a truck.) We filled baskets with green peppers that haunted us for weeks after that. It was all about extending the season as far past frost as we could, because frost was the end.
Of course, the trouble with all that intense squirrel activity was that the vegetables were never very interesting or tasty when they were picked at the tail end of their life span, and stored inexpertly. But when we were kids, we didn't know enough to be able to say that all that effort was slightly pointless. I would never eat a tomato that was picked green and ripened in a basement. Ugh.
Nowadays, we plant seeds and plants in the middle of the summer -- when it feels like the hardest part of the year to get anything to grow. We have to baby them with water and we have to spray them so the cabbage moths won't just eat them down to the ground. We have to find the exact right moment to plant spinach so it will germinate. Sometimes it takes four tries. Same with carrots. We do all of that because now the growing season goes all the way past fall and into winter.
And why did that happen? Partly because of the farmers markets and the local foods movement. When my parents started farming, there were practically no locally grown vegetables for sale in this region. They were sold in supermarkets, and they came from vegetable growing parts of the country. But things changed and the market grew and people figured out there was more to life than just Richmond tomatoes and Eastern Shore sweet corn. There was arugula and bok choy and kale. Just think, there are people alive who think that kale has always been a thing. It was always a thing in gardens, probably, and for people in the south.
So gradually we all started to grow stuff that could tolerate the cold. My favorite vegetable name of all time is still "Autumn Poem." It was a mustard that was once called Savannah Mustard (see, the people in the south knew about this food all along) and then it turned into Summer Jean. But Autumn Poem is no longer a seed that you can buy. The seed catalog people are at the mercy of some forces that I don't understand -- like fashion, I don't understand that either -- but you can't buy a certain variety for very long before it disappears.
The other important dynamic in the Loss of Frost is how late it comes now. It used to be that by September 15 or so we were on alert. Now we often can go all the way to the end of October, and sometimes beyond, before we get a killing frost. We still haven't had a really hard frost this year. The basil went down, and the zinnias, but we can still pick beans and cherry tomatoes today.
I would not be sure it was climate change EXCEPT that the danger of frost also ends much earlier in the spring now. We might get a random smack, but the drop dead date has moved back from Mother's Day and this year we daringly planted tomatoes outside in the field on April 17. This is unheard of on our farm, but we never had to cover anything and there was no frost after that date.
It is disorienting. I have lived through more than 50 years of being alert to the cycle of the seasons. The seasons are not starting and ending at the same time as they did for the first 40 years of my tenure. From where we sit on this tiny little piece of ground in Northern Virginia, I can tell you that things are changing faster than you might think. You might not notice if you are an indoor worker, but I am here to say that the calendar is slipping. This might not end well. In the short term, it is interesting and challenging to keep learning to grow differently to keep up with the new seasons, but in the long term we will find that the summer crops can't take the heat. We will be more like Alabama and Florida where they plant tomatoes in the winter and that season ends by early summer.
Hmm. This isn't where I thought I was going, but this is where I got. And this is where we are. I don't know what to think about all of this, but it is important to notice when mile markers disappear. We need a new map.
____
Way back in the olden days when I didn't even have a calendar, there were mile markers that were recognizable and repeated. Birthdays, Christmas, end of the school year, beginning of the school year, frost.
In my old age, only birthdays have held firm. The other milestones have vanished for me. The one that is the most disorienting, actually, is frost.
I can explain why frost is no longer a reliable marker of anything by recognizing that what we grow has changed so much since I was little -- we grow so many crops that are immune to frost that we barely notice it when it comes.
Back in the old days, there was a mad, arduous scramble to rescue every last perishable crop on the day before the frost. We picked every tomato of every color -- from hard green all the way to ripe. Then we wrapped the green ones in newspaper so they would ripen and stashed them in the basement. One time Ellen and I decided to pull all the bean plants and pile them into a pickup truck for later picking because the beans were so gorgeous and we couldn't pick them fast enough. (It ended up not being the best idea -- not much fun to pick beans from wilted plants that are piled in a truck.) We filled baskets with green peppers that haunted us for weeks after that. It was all about extending the season as far past frost as we could, because frost was the end.
Of course, the trouble with all that intense squirrel activity was that the vegetables were never very interesting or tasty when they were picked at the tail end of their life span, and stored inexpertly. But when we were kids, we didn't know enough to be able to say that all that effort was slightly pointless. I would never eat a tomato that was picked green and ripened in a basement. Ugh.
Nowadays, we plant seeds and plants in the middle of the summer -- when it feels like the hardest part of the year to get anything to grow. We have to baby them with water and we have to spray them so the cabbage moths won't just eat them down to the ground. We have to find the exact right moment to plant spinach so it will germinate. Sometimes it takes four tries. Same with carrots. We do all of that because now the growing season goes all the way past fall and into winter.
And why did that happen? Partly because of the farmers markets and the local foods movement. When my parents started farming, there were practically no locally grown vegetables for sale in this region. They were sold in supermarkets, and they came from vegetable growing parts of the country. But things changed and the market grew and people figured out there was more to life than just Richmond tomatoes and Eastern Shore sweet corn. There was arugula and bok choy and kale. Just think, there are people alive who think that kale has always been a thing. It was always a thing in gardens, probably, and for people in the south.
So gradually we all started to grow stuff that could tolerate the cold. My favorite vegetable name of all time is still "Autumn Poem." It was a mustard that was once called Savannah Mustard (see, the people in the south knew about this food all along) and then it turned into Summer Jean. But Autumn Poem is no longer a seed that you can buy. The seed catalog people are at the mercy of some forces that I don't understand -- like fashion, I don't understand that either -- but you can't buy a certain variety for very long before it disappears.
The other important dynamic in the Loss of Frost is how late it comes now. It used to be that by September 15 or so we were on alert. Now we often can go all the way to the end of October, and sometimes beyond, before we get a killing frost. We still haven't had a really hard frost this year. The basil went down, and the zinnias, but we can still pick beans and cherry tomatoes today.
I would not be sure it was climate change EXCEPT that the danger of frost also ends much earlier in the spring now. We might get a random smack, but the drop dead date has moved back from Mother's Day and this year we daringly planted tomatoes outside in the field on April 17. This is unheard of on our farm, but we never had to cover anything and there was no frost after that date.
It is disorienting. I have lived through more than 50 years of being alert to the cycle of the seasons. The seasons are not starting and ending at the same time as they did for the first 40 years of my tenure. From where we sit on this tiny little piece of ground in Northern Virginia, I can tell you that things are changing faster than you might think. You might not notice if you are an indoor worker, but I am here to say that the calendar is slipping. This might not end well. In the short term, it is interesting and challenging to keep learning to grow differently to keep up with the new seasons, but in the long term we will find that the summer crops can't take the heat. We will be more like Alabama and Florida where they plant tomatoes in the winter and that season ends by early summer.
Hmm. This isn't where I thought I was going, but this is where I got. And this is where we are. I don't know what to think about all of this, but it is important to notice when mile markers disappear. We need a new map.
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