Late frost plays havoc in garden

Everyone loves garden fresh tomatoes. I've always commiserated with people who have never tasted freshly-picked, ripe tomatoes. They buy tomatoes in the supermarket that look nice but whose flavor usually, in my opinion, resembles cardboard more than fruit.

For most of my life, we have raised our own tomatoes or, when that was impossible, we bought tomatoes fresh from a garden.

When we moved to Oregon, our first crop of tomatoes was very disappointing. Plants grew slowly and early-September frosts killed the vines so we harvested green tomatoes. When I talked to a neighbor, she told me we had moved to "green tomato country."

The next year I planted earlier, only to lose the young plants to frosts in June.

The next year, I planned to plant early again, wondering how to foil the late frosts? Hot caps were too small. I wanted to protect the plants to raise ripe tomatoes. I bought a big roll of clear plastic, measured my tomato cages and cut plastic squares three or four inches larger than the greatest circumference of the cage and six inches or so taller than the cage's height.

Using my sewing machine, I created a seam from top to bottom to form a plastic tube, then slid it down over the cage. That wasn't enough, however, to protect the plants on sharp, frosty nights.

I folded several thicknesses of newspaper into a liner which I wound around inside the bottom of each "hothouse" and watched the small plants grow. A late frost in June nipped the tops of the plants above the newspaper liner, but the plants below were well-rooted for a good early start.

I folded the overlapping plastic over the top to keep heat in until the weather really warmed, but which let rain drain in. I watched the plants grow. When the weather became dependably warm, I removed the plastic tubes and stacked them, rolled them and stored them in the garage to use the next year and the next and the next.

Each year, I had ripe tomatoes in July. My neighbors all asked , "How did you do it?" as they enjoyed ripe samples in that "green tomato country."

The same technique worked just as well for other frost-tender plants like peppers and eggplant. With the crazy weather we've had this year, it may be a useful technique to use again.