Avocado Trees

Plants in containers seems more like keeping houseplants than gardening, but it's my only option in the winter when frost threatens.
Avocado trees are pretty, too. I haven't kept any long enough to know if they'll bear fruit.
For years, my sister would kill them as fast as I could start them. I finally got smart and stopped giving them to her!
This tree is 3 years old and survived last winter even after my furnace died. (A smaller one didn't.)
I was starting them by pushing 3 toothpicks evenly around the pit and keeping the base in water. All too often, I'd let them dry out, so my success rate wasn't high.
Then I thought, why not just put them in dirt and keep them wet? After all, how do they start without human intervention?
It actually worked! Now I once again have small avocado trees for gifts!

Container gardens

I don't have much luck with container gardening. Perhaps because I don't use big enough pots. My sister planted cucumbers this summer and brought them in when they first predicted frost. I don't know how many cukes she got, but her husband mows off anything she'd plant in the ground, so this is her only option. He's killed her rhubarb.
I do well with house plants, but that's another story....

Harvesting after frost

These storm windows worked well protecting my plants from frost.

 I open them so my plants aren't over heated during sunny days and slide them closed when the forecast is for a cold might.

Beans and tomatoes are frost sensitive. Carrots are OK with a few nights below freezing. I still have a lot of green tomatoes that I want to finish vine ripening as long as possible. After one night of frost, I'm still collecting good harvests!
So far, I've added 1 month to my 4 month long growing season.

Carrots

I have deep, loose soil in my garden, but carrots never seem to get very big. I've started buying seeds for shorter carrots and just pull them after 10 or 12 weeks. They taste wonderful and I enjoy my gourmet baby carrots!
In SFG, carrots are planted 16 seeds to a square...VERY time consuming with those tiny seeds! But, as the author said, there's no thinning, so no wasted seeds. I like carrots so much that I planted 2 whole packets this year. No seeds to save for next year.
The gardening season is winding down. My beans are finished. Tomatoes are ripening slowly. Onions are all pulled. So, mostly I'm getting carrots. The rhubarb is slowing down, but I think there's 1 more harvest of rhubarb.