FREE GUIDE

The Frost Plan

Ten weeks of work that decide how your winter goes.

Most people find out their place wasn't ready the night it freezes. The tomatoes are still on the vine, the beds are bare, the hose is full of water, and nothing that needed doing got done.

This is the list I work off of every fall, counting backward from my first frost date to today. Ten chapters, one page each. It works whether your frost comes in September or December, and whether you have a garden and six hens or a garden and a herd.

THE TEN CHAPTERS

What is inside

  • Know your date, then walk the place
  • What dies, what lives, and what actually gets better
  • Plant the winter garden
  • Put the finished beds to bed
  • Low tunnels, built before you need them
  • Keep up with the harvest
  • Squash, pumpkins, and storing food without a root cellar
  • Decide who stays
  • Set up the winter coop
  • The place itself

THE PART MOST GUIDES GET WRONG

You will read in a lot of places that frost makes your greens sweeter. It is half true. Parsnips and spinach really do sweeten in the cold, and that is worth waiting for. But when the University of Tennessee actually measured kale, radish and turnip through a frost, they found no change in sugar at all. That matters, because if you are waiting on a frost to improve something that was already ready, you are just leaving food outside to get damaged. Chapter two tells you which is which, with the temperature each crop actually gives up at.

WHO IS TELLING YOU THIS

I'm Justin Rhodes. My family and I farm in western North Carolina, and I have been filming what happens here nearly every day for about ten years. A little over a million people watch.

I am not going to tell you this list will get you through a disaster. In September of 2024, Hurricane Helene came through here and it was past planning. Looking back, the one thing I would have done differently is move our bees uphill, and they were sitting well outside the range of a normal event, or even a normal bad one. That storm was ridiculous.

What I can tell you is that everything in these ten weeks is work worth doing in an ordinary year for ordinary reasons, and when things did go badly, the work held.

ONE MORE THING

Get the plan

Frost is coming on a specific date. You can look it up in about a minute, and chapter one shows you how. Everything after that is just working backward.