Before I went to bed last night I felt a sudden disturbance in the force. Although I’d checked the weather forecast – twice! – and it predicted a low of 40, the word “frost” flashed into my brain.
I checked again, and still no suggestion of anything cold enough to kill an outdoor plant. This morning I opened my eyes to sun bracketing the blackout curtains in our bedroom, and vowed to pick the peas. Even though it had been cool and very rainy all week, surely some of the last stragglers of the season would be ready to go.
And then DF came home from church. “Frost,” he announced.
It was 38 degrees at the time, but apparently it’s possible for frost to form even when the temperature is technically above freezing. (This short piece by Tom Skilling explains how.) At the time, I wasn’t interested in an explanation – I just wanted to see if anything in the garden was still alive.
Specifically, I was wondering about the pumpkins.
Just for fun we put two pumpkin seedlings into the ground in May. After a slow start we got exactly one fruit, which turned orange surprisingly fast. Ultimately we wound up with four more, two of which also turned orange. Two of them were latecomers and had only begun to turn orange (or so we thought) when the temperature changed.
Every day DF and I would go out to take a look at the garden in general, but our favorite part was the smallish pumpkin patch. The bright orange shining through the leaves, and the steady growth of the green ones, filled us with inordinate happiness. We anticipated letting his granddaughters choose their own jack o’ lantern material, and to invite Orion, the free-range kid to choose one as well.
And now a stealth frost might have ruined that.
Coincidentally, I’d just been reading about how to know when a pumpkin is ready to be cut and whether green ones will turn orange over time once they’re brought indoors. Different articles said different things, but all agreed that anything other than a light touch of frost is ruinous to Curcurbita maxima.
The inevitable frost
The old poem that begins “When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock” makes it sound as though the fruits will handle cold weather just fine. According to the University of Illinois, however, keeping a pumpkin outdoors when it’s 27 degrees or colder means you’ll likely lose it.
We don’t know how cold it got last night, but the vines looked stressed and the leaves looked terrified. Thus we decided to bring those rascals indoors today, rather than risk losing them. Some folks are crazy cat people; apparently we are Crazy Pumpkin People.
Also crazy tomato people, but those plants seemed unharmed. They’re on their way out, of course, but they weren’t blackening and rotting. The outdoor cucumber plants (same family as pumpkins) were wilting, though.
DF invited his son and granddaughters over to help pull up the rainbow carrots and to pose for pictures with the pumpkins. When he picked up the green ones, he was surprised to see that they were turning orange on their flat undersides.
(The bowl on the middle shelf is full of partially ripened tomatoes. Figured we had better start bringing those in, too – but this is only about one-third of the crop. The green ones I will likely dehydrate for winter soups.)
The fruits weigh between 15 and 28 pounds apiece, and their presence in our kitchen fills us with ineffable delight. They’re so sturdy, so gleaming, so orange. Even the still-partly-green ones make us happy. Given enough sun, they’ll likely ripen in time for Halloween.
Until then, they’ll be beacons on the steadily darkening days – reminders that we had one heck of a summer, and that we’ll have one heck of a spooky Samhain, too.
Related reading:
I love how pumpkins grow with such abandon! Some year you might want to try Red Warty Things. They are the best for Halloween! No frost in my yard in Fairbanks. I have over 100 leeks that can live until it snows, carrots which can withstand a frost and scallions that I cover with row cover material. Tonight I finally finished my last batch of spaghetti sauce and skillet tomato jam. Everything else was picked and canned or dehydrated last weekend. I love gardening but I also love that it shuts down for a few months–I would hate to live in a place where the garden goes all year long! I never heard of using green tomatoes in soups? Can you say more? I have a recipe for green tomato parmesan, just like eggplant version where you bread and crisp them in the oven before layering. Quite tasty…
One year we had a lot of small green tomatoes that we sliced and put into the dehydrator. They wind up looking like little green wagon wheels and we used them in soup, thinking they’d add some nutrition and some visual interest. In fact, they tasted very sweet (because we took out most of the water and left the tomato flavor?) and ever-so-slightly chewy.
My mother used to make green tomato pickles. They were amazingly good! I make green tomato salsa. Alas, not enough green tomatoes this year when the vines died. Heat and lack of rain killed them early.
Last year DF made a ton of green tomato salsa while I was at my daughter’s. I think it amounted to 18 quarts’ worth. This stuff makes a wonderful chili verde, and the other day he used a quart of it to make a marvelous chili-like stew, along with celery from the garden, a can of tomatoes, some broth from the freezer, a pound of ground beef and, of course, onions. I made a batch of slow-cooker pinto beans to serve on the side; DF is from Texas and he doesn’t put beans in chili.
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Yes….?
Every time you write about your garden, I think that I want a garden. Well, I do WANT one, I just don’t want to have to actually do the work! No room for a garden right now anyway. Enjoy those pumpkins.
I know nothing about growing pumpkins or the effects of frost, but all of this brought something to mind. I’m still an avid reader of the Little House books and I recall Ma harvesting green pumpkins and, in a burst of well known thrift, make green pumpkin pie. Thin slices of green pumpkin, sugar, a sprinkling of vinegar, and traditional apple pie spices. I wonder if any one ever researched that recipe?
I did, in fact, research that recipe! If the green ones didn’t turn orange, I swore to DF, then I would turn them into green pumpkin pie. Apparently it tastes like apple pie.
Which would be a bit amusing, since our little apple trees bore so profusely that we have about 21 pies’ worth sliced, sugared and seasoned in the freezer. While I won’t let the pumpkins go to waste, it appears they will probably finish ripening on their own.
I love the Little House books too. In fact, I love them so much I traveled to DeSmet, SD and beyond to see where Laura once lived. A wonderful trip. But my ‘real’ reason for replying was to say I have heard that zucchini, especially the large club-like ones that seem to grow to that size overnight, make excellent apple crisp and to discern it from real apple crisp is apparently not easy. So I’m thinking to use another type of Squash, that being green pumpkins, for pie may result in similar deliciousness as pies.
If you can make an apple pie out of Ritz crackers, I figure zucchini will probably work, too:
http://www.backofthebox.com/recipes/pies-pastries/ritz-mock-apple-pie.html
I’ve always wondered how that ‘apple’ pie tastes. Maybe it’s time to find out!
I wonder if it would work with other types of crackers?
No frost here, but the pear tree was full of fruit and bears have been roaming. Yesterday I got the majority of the slightly green pears. I took flats of them around to all the neighbors that were home/would take some. We still have several bushels worth. Soon the apple tree will be ready, but every other person on the street has a tree so we’ll be stuck with them.
I left my pumpkins out and now soft from frost can I still dehydrate or put in oven I scooped out the seeds but what about pumpkin itself I am unsure about whether I can save any
According to Michigan State University:
“Squash and pumpkins that have frosted or frozen begin to decay as soon as they have thawed. They may not be usable shortly after a heavy frost and certainly cannot handle prolonged storage with their protective skins compromised.”
Personally, I’d pitch them into the compost.