I have had the most incredible seed saving journey in the last couple of days, in the literal sense.
I've been keeping a fairly close eye on the weather network for nighttime lows for awhile. However, things apparently can shift quickly and two days ago at 10 o'clock at night I saw a frost advisory warning out of the blue. OMG, it was black outside. And of all times, we could not find the flashlight which DH had just used in a plumbing job a week ago. There was absolutely no way I could find all my blankets out in the sheds with no flashlight, let alone work among the plants. Really, almost everything left as far as beans was poles so I would have needed to use a ladder as well, which would have been crazy in the dark. It would have taken hours to tackle that level of covering. About 1/2 (or more) of this years seed crop was still out there.
DH said to go out at the crack of dawn and hose down the plants, that was about the only thing I could do at this point. That night I barely slept, maybe 3 interupted hours of sleep. I got up just as the dark was receding and the lawn was pure white. I went for the 1st hose, it was frozen. No water would come out! Of the 3 hoses I had, I got one to work (probably because it had no nozzle). I sprayed everything I could reach, and managed to finally get the 2nd hose going. I hosed for about 1.5 hours rotating around the gardens. I started feeling *perturbed* at DH and this whackadoodle idea when I saw that ice sheets had formed all over the plants. I mean the bean pods were coated in ice, the bean leaves, the cherry tomatoes. I tried over and over to hose the ice off, and as you can imagine that didn't work.
By 8 a.m. I gave up, and I was beyond exhausted, wet and cold. I tried to go back to sleep so I could have nominal brain function and get warm, but I was so upset about the whole situation I could not fall asleep. After an hour I got up and discussed the situation with DH, reporting back about how his plan failed. He laughed and told me the plants were SUPPOSED to get covered in ice. I mean, I can't think of anything more counterintuitive than that. I went outside to see the damage and my gosh every single bean plant was fine. A few of them, the very top of the pole got zipped, because they were 12 feet and I didn't shoot the water up on top thoroughly I guess. But the ice actually worked. I can't even believe it! The tomato plants that I didn't hose down because I couldn't get the 3rd hose to work in that section of garden were blackened. Oh boy did I get lucky!!!! I told him from now on forget your name, I'm calling you MacGyver!
