Frosty Grocery Row Gardens | The Survival Gardener

Over the last few weeks, we’ve had frosts here and there. It still astounds me to see ice on the ground. Having grown up in Ft. Lauderdale, frost is novel.

This probably sounds nuts to those of you farther north, but we only experienced one frost in the first 23 years of my life.

Once I moved to Tennessee for a job, I got to experience actual winter conditions.

I didn’t like them much, and was cold and miserable all the time. My friend Will from Wisconsin told me that Tennessee winters weren’t even real winter, but they were enough for me. It’s milder here in Lower Alabama, even though it still freezes enough to kill off most tropical plants. I won’t complain about missing the tropics, and I’ll try not to remember what it was like to have a year-round growing season with endless tropical fruits.

No. Who needs all that fancy stuff, like cacao and breadfruit and nutmeg?

I’m just going to say that it’s beautiful to see how the frost decorates the ground. It’s really, truly, beautiful and is a special part of God’s creation and I ain’t gonna grumble ’bout it no more ever.

In a normal fall and winter, I would have lots of brassicas growing in these rows. The ground should be covered in green, in between the sleeping trees and shrubs. However, this year we had bad drought all the way until first frost so we never planted anything.

We planted the two beds of daikons and brassicas closer to the house and that was it:

I didn’t want to have to water anything else and the ground was hard, dusty and dry everywhere.

We don’t have irrigation in the Grocery Row Gardens and don’t intend on adding it unless we get a well, so this year we just have mulch there instead of greenery.

That’s fine, though, since we’re still eating lots of produce we brought in before the frosts, like pumpkins, sweet potatoes and yams, and the brassica beds more than supply our greens and roots for now.

God is good, and it’s really been a blessing to garden here on this soil behind a house we actually own.

Have a great weekend.

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