the big freeze

On Sunday night, the big freeze finally arrived in Homestead. After a long and frigid day at market, Jamie and I took shelter for the evening at the local Cracker Barrel. As my friend Chelsea put it, you know you’re in a bad way when you’re digging the local Cracker Barrel. I was more than digging it. I was loving it. The country ham. The curiously uniform cubes of breaded fried okra, with their slimy seedy insides. Whatever. Bring it. Just let me defrost my toes for a while.

After dinner we rocketed from the truck straight into our down sleeping bags, armed with hot water bottles. And while we slept, the frost fell. I woke around 7 am to glitter on the grass.

The whole Redlands area got it bad. All down Bauer and Krome, fields of bush beans and tomatoes look crispy and dark, fried by the cold. Muriel said that one of our neighbors appeared to have had some success with covering his young tomato plants with empty nursery pots – thousands of them. But for the most part, the fields are fried.

At Bee Heaven, the pole beans look the worst. It’s a downer. We only got a week or two of harvesting in, and most varieties had yet to really hit their stride.

Can they bounce back? Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m curious to see how other local growers roll with the punches. Are they going to till in all in and start over? Is the season too far along for that? Today I saw tractors out spraying on my way to the craft store – Margie is one of the few organic growers in the area, and most spray a hard core herbicide on crop residues before they till them in. I’m not even a chemical phobe, per say, but I’ll usually roll up the windows on the truck as a I drive by one of those rigs. It’s incredible the effect the herbicide has – overnight it looks like someone went in the fields with a blowtorch, everything crumpled and brown.

But finally, after over a week of frigid nights, the big freeze seems to be abating. Tomorrow, the row cover comes off, and we can see who’s still standing.