10/15/2026
Frost tonight. Here's the two-hour list. ❄️
- HARVEST EVERYTHING TENDER
Tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, squash, beans, cucumbers, basil. None
of it survives the night. Strip the plants.
- GREEN TOMATOES ARE NOT A LOSS
This is the one people throw away unnecessarily.
Any tomato that has started to lighten from deep green — even
slightly — will ripen indoors. Wrap them individually in newspaper,
or box them with a banana, which releases ethylene and speeds the
whole lot along.
Check the box weekly and pull out anything soft. You'll be eating
your own tomatoes in November.
- CUT ALL THE BASIL
It blackens at around 40°F, before frost even arrives. It is always
the first thing to go. Cut the lot tonight and make pesto — it
freezes well in ice cube trays.
🪴 BRING THE POTS IN — BUT INSPECT THEM FIRST
- This is how aphids, mealybugs and spider mites get into your house
and spend all winter on your houseplants.
Check under the leaves. Hose the plant down. Some people leave pots
in a garage for a week first, as a quarantine.
🛏️ COVER WHAT'S WORTH SAVING
- CLOTH ONLY — an old sheet, a blanket, garden fleece. Pegged right
down to the SOIL on every side, so it traps the ground's warmth. A
cover that doesn't reach the ground does almost nothing.
- NOT PLASTIC ON THE FOLIAGE. Wherever plastic touches a leaf
overnight, that leaf freezes. If plastic is all you have, build a
frame so it never contacts the plant.
- Take covers off in the morning. Left on in the sun, you'll cook
and rot what you spent last night saving.
- WATER BEFORE SUNSET
Counterintuitive, but real: moist soil absorbs far more of the day's
heat than dry soil and releases it slowly overnight. It's worth a
degree or two around your plants, and it costs you ten minutes.
- DRAIN THE HOSES AND OUTDOOR TAPS
Not tonight's emergency, but this is the night everyone forgets, and
a split tap in January is a bad surprise.
- AND NOW THE PART THAT MATTERS AS MUCH: WHAT TO LEAVE ALONE.
Kale, collards, spinach, carrots, beets, parsnips, leeks and
brussels sprouts all get BETTER tonight.
Frost triggers them to convert stored starch into sugar — it's
antifreeze, chemically — and the result is a genuinely sweeter
vegetable. Brussels sprouts are barely worth eating until they've
been frosted.
Don't cover them. Don't harvest them in a panic. Let it happen.
- And if you grow dahlias, gladioli or cannas: WAIT for the frost
to blacken the foliage before digging the tubers. That blackening is
the signal the plant has finished moving energy down into storage.
Digging early gives you weaker tubers next year.
- KNOW WHICH FROST YOU'RE GETTING:
LIGHT FROST 29–32°F — tender plants only.
FREEZE 25–28°F — most summer crops are finished.
HARD FREEZE below 24°F — that's the season.
- And one thing the forecast won't tell you: a CLEAR, STILL night
runs 3 to 5 degrees colder than predicted, because there's no cloud
holding heat in and no wind mixing the air.
Cloudy and breezy, you're probably fine. Calm and starry, take it
seriously.
- Two hours tonight saves most of what's left out there — and the
rest of it is getting sweeter while you sleep.
