What a winter we are having here… we did not even have 3 months between frosts this season, and now we are into our 6th severe frost/permafrost. In the middle of it all, we lost the water to our property due to a leak in the main line from the street, and after we had dug that up to repair it, a huge frost hit and the ground and everything in it and on it froze for a whole week. It appears a previous owner had planted a tree over the water line and it had broken and bent the pipe. It was not much fun for us at all!
As we had no water on the property, we had to move out to a friends. We lost a lot of plants, as we could not water the frost off, and the wind was coming up in the day-time, so I was unable to lay frost cloth out and have it stay there. One day it as so cold and frozen that the peg box (which had filled with water in the rains previously), turned into a block of solid ice in the backyard and I had to smash it with an axe to get the pegs out so I could hang the clothes! So our gardens are not so great, but at least we are back home again. My apologies for not doing a post for so long, but it has been horrible and hectic all in one! 
But, despite the terrible weather and freezing conditions, we did manage to still harvest something:
2x Snowball Turnips
1x large bowl of Pak Choi
1x large bowl of Mustard Greens
1x large bowl of mixed Kale
2x frost damaged/hail damaged Tat Soi plants
3x frost burned and half ruined Cauliflowers
2x bags of Brussel Sprouts heads – that I trimmed off to make the sprouts grow bigger 
The beautiful looking Cauliflowers before our water pipe burst and the big freeze turned everything to ice (below): 
The Cauliflowers after the frost got to them (below) – they were frozen solid for days and so got really badly frost burned, as I had no water to defrost them with :(. But I picked them anyway, and chopped the worst burned brown bits off and cut the florets up and made Cauliflower Chickpea Satay for dinner with them, and it was still yummy! 🙂 
The frost damaged Tat Soi we picked (below left), but we still managed to salvage some of it to eat – not like the Misome (below right) – which was too far gone, although I hope it might yet manage to grow back again: 
After doing so well even in the initial cold, the Blue Shelling Peas (below), have well and truly died now 😦 
But, the rest of the garden is not doing too badly, as some of the plants are still frost hardy – especially the Kale: 
I hope to be back again next week with better news and a more profitable harvest, but as it is currently snowing outside after freezing again last night, I am not so sure!
Anyway, wherever you are and whatever you are growing, I wish you peace and productive ground with a fantastic harvest. X Suz
© 2014-2015: “Garden to Kitchen” with Suz – All content on this blog is Copyright.
