Fall Harvest of carrots, parsnips, onions, beets, corn and basil

By Lara Fominoff

Now’s the time to harvest many of your fruits and veggies

Sep 25, 2019 | 10:41 AM

LETHBRIDGE, AB – By some estimates, Lethbridge could be hit with anywhere from five to 25 cm of snow over the weekend, along with overnight lows that could get down to minus eight degrees by Monday night.

According to Green Haven Garden Centre’s Karen Barby, that means harvesting most, if not all of your above ground garden vegetables like peas, beans, corn, tomatoes, peppers, herbs- and even onions in the next day or so.

“The most important are the vegetables, because you’re still growing those to eat. The flowers you can cover with blankets or you can move – if they’re in containers and pots – you can move them inside, like to a garage.”

Barby says minus seven degrees is the critical threshold for many plants. She calls it a “killing frost.” Squash can normally take a light frost, but when it gets to down to that temperature, they too can be ruined. One option if you can’t or don’t want to harvest them, is to cover everything with heavy blankets.

Root vegetables are a different matter though. They can stay in the ground for some time still.

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“Depends on how much snow we get. Snow is actually an insulator. If there is five centimetres of snow, you would have this layer of insulation and root crops can handle that and minus seven is not a danger…Carrots can take it, beets can take it, parsnips would love it.”

For those with flower gardens, if you can’t bring in pots, heavy blankets might work also for a short period of time.

“At some point, they’re going to get caught by that frost. So, just depending on how much – if this is just a couple of nights and then it gets nice again, it’s always nice to enjoy those flowers in October.”

While snow and cold temperatures can and do occur many years in September, Barby says this weekend’s forecast caught some gardeners and nurseries off guard, especially since the growing season got a bit of a later start.

“It was definitely late, yes we found that. We seemed to pick up in early September though. September stayed quite nice. Often, we often in the middle of September we can get a light frost of minus three or something, and then we have to watch our gardens. This year, we’re still waiting for things to finish ripening. A lot of things will ripen though, off the vine.”

Barby says if they can, gardeners should wrap up their harvesting if they haven’t already done so.

“It’s not fun picking things and getting things out of wet, cold weather.”