After the Frost

We were hit by frost on Tuesday night. We've been busy and hadn't tried to save anything. I just shrugged and figured whatever gets zapped, gets zapped. Today my garden looks like this.
At least my lettuce (mostly Red Sails), carrots, onions, mustard and collards and cabbages still look pretty good.

My tomatoes are all done for and the bell peppers look sad and wilty.

And my basil has turned brown.

We are on fall break from school and are about to go on our annual fall/Halloween camping trip. When we get back, it looks like I have lots of clean up to do in the garden.

Today's local weather:
High temp: 64
Low temp: 46
Partly cloudy, showers overnight.

Delayed Gratification

I had been holding off on harvesting my Beauregard sweet potatoes because I'd read somewhere that you should wait for the foliage to start turning brown before they are ready. Then yesterday I was poking around on gardenweb.com and I read that you are supposed to get sweet potatoes out of the ground before the first frost. Now, it has "only" been getting down to the 40's at night lately, but I don't want to be caught off guard. I am really busy right now so I need to use the time when I have it. Besides, it is October now and I planted these things on Mother's Day weekend in May. That should be plenty of time, right?

Well, as you can see, I have a very respectable crop. This was my first time to grow sweet potatoes and I didn't know how to plant them. I didn't realize you were supposed to take the plant from the nursery and separate it into slips before planting them all. I just planted the whole thing as one big clump. As a result, many of my potatoes are on the smallish side. But I'm not complaining. And next year I'll know how to plant them. I think I have several fairly large ones despite them being crowded!

This was definitely one of my more successful crops and I will grow them again without a doubt.

Today's local weather:
High temp: 75 F
Low temp: 46 F
Sunny and clear