I really intended to get this post up either late last week or early this week. Now, all the pictures were taken before the recent snow and cold weather. I’ll get around to taking the row covers off again and checking on things after a couple weeks. (We’ll watch the weather and pick a nice day!) I haven’t been disturbing the row covers to read the temperatures, but the next time I check, I’ll see what the absolute Minimum and Maximum temperatures were for the cold spell.

The carrots are looking quite sad, but they are still alive. More importantly, they are harvestable. The roots don’t show any freeze or cold injury and are fine to pull and eat. So if you don’t have a root cellar, it seems to be reasonable to leave your carrots in the garden under cover, at least until it gets really cold.

The Watermelon Radishes are about 80% dead at this point. Many of the roots are still alive, but they are no longer harvestable because they have freeze injury in them. Yuck! I pulled these out and put them in the compost bin.

The beets are looking better than the radishes, but not great. The roots are still harvestable, so I’m letting them go and hoping that they have survived the cold this week.

The spinach under the plastic cover actually looks worse that the spinach under the fabric. It’s even arguably worse than the spinach outside. I think the warmer conditions under the plastic row cover caused some disease and more aphids than otherwise.

The kale is definitely looking pitiful. I’m pretty sure that the kale would look better than this if it had been left completely uncovered! It is normally very cold tolerant, but I think the plastic row cover was keeping things just a bit to warm for the kale to develop enough cold tolerance.

The radicchio looks a little more “zapped” than I anticipated, but it is starting to form very small heads in the center of each plant. It is also pretty cool to see the variation in color/color pattern on the different plants.

This particular radicchio plant is still looking pretty nice. I can’t wait to see how purple these have turned after the recent cold weather!

The leeks are really looking pretty good. I’m impressed by how big the are getting. The front leek was the first seedling to come up way back in August when I started the seeds inside. If the leeks are less than perfect come spring, I think it will be entirely because I didn’t get the seeds started soon enough.

The onions aren’t looking quite as nice as the leeks. The leaves are showing some damage. I’m not sure if it is cold injury, disease (from too much humidity), or maybe onion thrips. It looks a little bit like thrips, but I’m not sure.

I couldn’t resist pulling one of the onions. It obviously has not been convinced to “bulb” yet, even though it is supposed to be a short day onion. Maybe the days are too short? I hope the onions have survived, because I really want to see if the bulb up in the spring before the days get long.

That’s what was happening in the garden last week. It will be interesting to see what is still there by the next time we look under the row covers.