For you new gardeners, we wanted to put up a post about what frost looks like on plants. You might see your plant’s leaves do “strange things” around this time of year and there’s no cause for concern.
As you can see here, we got some very, very light frost on some of our squash plants. Squash and other “warm loving” plants are usually the very first to show any signs of frost damage. They are simply so sensitive that even the lightest frosts can cause our plants to react.
Eventually, once the frosts get severe enough, the leaves will pretty much be eviscerated. At this point, photosynthesis is pretty much no longer possible. So, harvesting any remaining crops becomes of paramount importance since any fruit will no longer receive appropriate resources. The clock for spoilage starts ticking pretty fast once this happens.
Many plants are frost tolerant, so they’ll avoid this kind of damage from relatively light frosts. This is one of the big reasons we talk about and emphasize frost tolerance for both planting and harvesting. But, if you observe your garden carefully as temperatures dip further, you’ll see this kind of damage progressively hit more and more plants as we dive into winter. This is that frost tolerance, in action.
When it comes to winter squash, we’ve generally preferred waiting until our first frost to do our harvest. (Which this is not yet that, the damage will be much more severe when it happens.) It makes it easier to see the squash, since they’re often sprawling all over the place.
The squash themselves will tolerate that frost just fine, despite the plant looking terrible. But, it’s important to harvest very soon after, as those squash won’t last forever without nutrition and appropriate temperatures. This is also generally true for “most” fruit bearing vegetables, too, although there’s often not any technical benefit (like visibility and squash) with other kinds of plants.
So, if you’re seeing things like this occur in your garden, that’s what’s going on. It’s just the sign that the gardening season is coming to an end. Don’t fret too much. There’s always next season!
