SFG Adventure of a first time gardener in ND

Well, looking at the weather forecast for this weekend, it looks like it will be time to harvest the remainder of the fall garden and call it quits for the winter. I will be out of town this weekend and starting on Thursday we are supposed to get some snow. Saturday forecast says a high of 29 and a low of 5F. Don't think my little plastic will be enough protection, so sometime in the next 3 days I'm going to be eating a lot of swiss chard, some kale, and just a little bit of spinach that is left.

I'd definitely eat the spinach and swiss chard before then, but consider leaving some of the kale and see how it does. Some of mine survived a 5F (-15C) low last winter, and that was without plastic (but possibly with some snow cover - I wasn't home to know.)

Rob, If you have a surplus, try blanching-chilling for freezing. https://squarefoot.forumotion.com/t16490-blanching-and-freezing-vegetables

Last up date for a while. Everything save the kale was harvested a few weeks back before the impending cold snap I had mentioned.  The kale did survive and was harvested last week to be made into kale chips (which it turns out I really like).

Garden was all cleaned up and a layer of shredded leaves put on top, held in place by a covering of tulle.  one of my neighbors had suggested I try to plant spinach in the fall to overwinter, as she has success doing it. I actually planted that a few weeks back, but think it forgot to mention it.  not really high hopes for it but we'll see! card board boxes were put on top of the seedlings spinach and garlic in preparation for the cold, and we filled with shredded leaves.  Because my garlic grew so high during out warmer than average fall, and I wanted all the foliage to be covered, these boxes ended up being about 10 inches deep!

This week has brought on the brutal arrival of winter.  Sunday when I went to bed, we had no snow on the ground, by yesterday we had 24 inches of it!  Attached is a photo of my garden in the snow taken yesterday evening.  what a difference 3 days can make!

Wowzers!

EEK! I just posted a photo of a distant peak with a sprinkling of snow on it and called it "winter."   (Shows how much I know about stuff.)