Wintergardening

[Hugo (Hugo Morvan)]

Winter’s way easier to garden. No insects, dying thirsty plants, scorching heat waves, having to get up at 4.30 to be out at 6 to have some time before going to work to work in the garden without heat stroke.
Just dress properly and get some sunhours.

Onions and brassica

An unholy mish mash of dropped seeds and lettuces slowfighting and cooperating with mycelia for growth in the hoop house

Outside parsley lane and Bruxelles Sprouts F1 mix with Russian Red Kale

Brocoli has lovely sweet foliage after frost

Winter radish and swiss chard grex take root

Colored big seeded amaranth and aztek brocolli

[MashaZ (Masha Zager)]

It always amazes me how long the garden keeps going into fall! In addition to brassica, we still have radicchio, leeks, fennel, and celery to pick, and maybe a fall crop of sorrel. It’s so much nicer without the mosquitoes.

[UnicornEmily (Emily Martha Sorensen)]

I’m pretty sure I remember seeing David the Good talk about that in one of his videos. I think it was him. He said where he lives, the summers are so hot that they basically have two growing seasons: early spring through early summer, and early fall through early winter.

I think I may have seen someone living in Arizona say something about their (110-120 degree, super arid) summers being a terrible time to garden, and their (rarely below 30-degree) winters being perfect for gardening.

However, in Hong Kong, where I lived as a teenager, the 100-degree super wet summers were great for growing things, and the 40-degree dry winters weren’t. There wasn’t any rain in winter, and there was buckets and buckets and buckets of it the rest of the year, so the plants just went dormant and waited for spring.

So yeah, I’m sure it depends greatly on what your climate is!

I plan on growing as many winter crops as I can. Since that’s the time of year when we get most of our water, and a lot of our weeds are winter annual grasses that take advantage of that, growing lots of winter crops seems smart to me.

[Oogyboogawa (John Warren)]

I’ve been thinking about this more recently since I find myself in one of those regions where we don’t spend a ton of time below freezing, but our Summers tend to spend a lot of time over 100F.

There aren’t many native plants that grow much during the winter, so it’s taken me a while to wrap my head around the idea of it being a potential growing period, but I’m getting there lol.

I don’t have a hoop house or any kind of infrastructure or anything like that currently, so I’m just in the process of figuring out the various things we can grow through the winter as well as just later into the fall and earlier in the spring…

I’m really liking the idea though, both because I love the idea of having fresh produce on our land for a longer stretch of the year, but also because the Summer gets so suffocatingly hot.

[UnicornEmily (Emily Martha Sorensen)]

I just barely put in a greenhouse! It has three 50-gallon rain barrels inside, and I have three 250-gallon IBC tanks on the north side. All of those will be filled with captured rainwater.

I’m hoping those will cumulatively serve as enough thermal mass to make my coldest winter days zone 8b in there, rather than 7b. If I can consistently keep it two zones warmer, as in 9b, I could get away with a whole lot of fruit trees I’d really like to grow, which would be awesome.

I’m suspecting that it may serve another valuable purpose in winter, too: keeping the soil moist, rather than sodden. Our winters are when we get most of our water, and I think that may be highly problematic for plants that don’t grow in winter and don’t like wet feet (a.k.a. bananas).

I’ve put some banana pups in there over the winter to see how they do, and I’ve also planted a whole bunch of ginger, which is hardy to zone 9a, and is in the same order and wants similar growing conditions. I figure if I can keep ginger alive in there, it’s a good sign for other zone 9a perennials I may want to test out in it later.

Last Thursday, right before our first hard freeze, I covered my best squash plants with three layers of greenhouse plastic, with about 10 milk jugs filled with water around their roots. I assumed they’d die, but I wanted to see if I could get away with doing that to keep them alive.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I found that they’d lived! The outer leaves are wilted and brown, but the inner leaves of each plant are doing well, as are the main stems. Two of the plants had a brand new female flower open this morning, so I happily hand-pollinated them. Maybe I’ll get little bitty summer squashes, or maybe I’ll be able to keep the plants alive long enough for them to give me fruit old enough to finish maturing indoors and give me viable seeds. Wouldn’t that be something?

I’m going to see how long I can keep those squash plants alive and bearing new fruit. Removing the plastic every morning and putting it back every late afternoon is a bit of a bother, but one I’m happy to do for right now. It’s a fun experiment, and it’s a really hopeful sign that I can keep perennials alive that are almost hardy enough for my zone!

Hmm, come to think of it, if I want to see if I can get away with zone 10a plants (most tropical perennials I’m interested in), one way to do that would be to try keeping zucchinis alive in the greenhouse all winter. Those winterkill at freezing, which is the same temperature that zone 10a perennials do. It’s no big deal at all to risk a squash plant as a canary in a coal mine; I have oodles of squash seeds. Yes, this is an experiment I should definitely try running!

[Oogyboogawa (John Warren)]

Ooh … I really like where that line of thought is going. And I love that you can theoretically test it out with zucchini rather than actually needing to try growing anything more exotic right away.

But I would also love to eventually have a space set up which allowed me to grow some fruits (at least primarily) from more tropical zones.

Bananas are also one of my priorities to try to get started here next year, but having a space like that would open up the options for different varieties and not worrying so much about protecting them during the winter.

I’ve wondered before about using water tanks for thermal mass like that. Possibly also digging down a ways to draw on some really basic geothermal energy with them. Or potentially using a small solar panel to turn them into a thermal battery. Of course, then you’d need to be sure to switch over to discharging the energy somewhere else before the temperature of the water got too high (assuming the solar panel was capable of bringing the temp up high enough for that to become an issue).

Or perhaps just having enough water used as thermal mass and positioned to catch the sun at the right time of day would be enough to achieve the desired effect without overcomplicating it… I really don’t know. Since I don’t have anything set up at all yet, all I can do is let my mind wander lol!

I am very interested to learn how things go for you though as you pursue these goals.

[UnicornEmily (Emily Martha Sorensen)]

I don’t know if it was the right call or not, but I decided to do the reverse: I piled up a foot of wood chips above soil level around the greenhouse. I’ve heard that dips in the soil can become frost pockets, and I know heat rises, so I figured maybe lifting the soil level up a foot higher would make it easier to keep warmth in. It’ll also make it easier to keep excessive moisture out, which is something I probably ought to be careful about in winter.

And since there’s such a deep mulch of wood chips, which are like giant sponge, they should stay consistently moist in summer even if the whole greenhouse area is essentially a berm. If I wind up discovering I was wrong about that, I can always dig swales in the greenhouse area in spring.

I will say that my squashes I’m protecting right now are in a swale, and I suspect that has helped. If nothing else, I doubt it has hindered. The foot-deep swale also gives me a convenient place to put milk jugs, without having to worry about them falling over against the greenhouse plastic and potentially jostling it.

Yes, I should definitely plant some squash seeds (and maybe melons and watermelons?) in my greenhouse over the winter. A groundcover layer can only be beneficial (more mulch and more thermal mass!), and the leaves are big and show cold damage easily. I like this idea!

[Hugo (Hugo Morvan)]

So it’s been rainy for weeks now. The first flocks of crane birds V-d by last week. Gru-gru. Colder weather is coming.
Plants have grown.
Some pix, just because.

Corianders and chervil

Rocket salad and yacon

Egyption walking onions

My endives grex. Anybody grows those?

More endives

[clweeks (Christopher Weeks)]

Just to show off what winter gardening looks like where I live. We haven’t yet made it into single digits Fahrenheit, but we got close. (Now it’s bouncing up to 50, next week!)

[UnicornEmily (Emily Martha Sorensen)]

Cool! What are all those plants you have in there?

[clweeks (Christopher Weeks)]

Oh, basically just chiles, but there are some weeds too.

[UnicornEmily (Emily Martha Sorensen)]

Ha ha!

Are you keeping this year’s pepper plants in there in order to overwinter them, so you’ll get production from them faster next year? I know a lot of people like to overwinter pepper plants, since they’re perennials.

[clweeks (Christopher Weeks)]

Yes, that’s what I’m doing. I’ll get a few pods over the winter and then they’ll be ready to burst out in June instead of waiting for August. Hopefully.

There’s just not much else that we can call winter gardening in northern Minnesota.

[UnicornEmily (Emily Martha Sorensen)]

Sounds like good winter gardening to me!

Can you do the same thing with more cold-hardy species, like brassicas and peas? Those taste delicious in the winter, which all their starches converted to sugars.

[anon14613632]

The temperatures right now are ranging from 30 degrees low to mid 50 degrees high. Can anyone recommend what types of seeds I should sow?

I am thinking about planting a bunch of carrot seeds. I’ve never tried carrot seeds with this temperature range. It seems bound to fail.

[Hugo (Hugo Morvan)]

Hmm, i don’t know what is a good timing for carrots, all i know is if you have saved enough seeds and you fail, you can try later. Total shitty advice.
What my idea of wintergardening is , is starting before November with seeding. Not that i’m such a great super expert on the matter, but i found loads of dropped seeds to be sprouting around that time anyway, so i took nature’s hint to fully seed those veggies and their families in beds. Cause why not?
Then growth really isn’t spectacular, but since i’ve seeded all through the garden, there’s enough to keep me happy. Making big healthy salads in the dead of winter is a freaking luxury.
Growth is slow, but steadily nevertheless, it keeps other wild plants from becoming a nuisance, i leave the biggest plants to grow , eat medium and smaller ones and in a month time when the sun steadily becomes more prevalent they’ll pick up speed and i’ll let the biggest go to seed and have more than enough to share and have enough to start again next year.

[peterd (Peter Dilley)]

We are 57/37 averages here. This is the overall plan for January in this area. You could use this as somewhat of a guide:

January

Plant onions now through the end of the month. Onions need as much time in the ground as possible. The more leaves an onion has at bulbing, the bigger the bulb. Here in North Texas, we grow short-day and intermediate-day onions.

Start seeds for spring tomatoes. This might seem early, but tomato transplants need to be ready to go in the ground late February to mid-March.

Start perennial seeds indoors.

Start cool-season vegetables by seed. Indoors: Broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, collard greens, kale, lettuce. Outdoors: Spinach, swiss chard.

Plant trees and shrubs.

Divide perennials and biennials such as phlox, violets, hollyhocks, irises, daylilies and shasta daisies if they are crowded.

[anon14613632]

Thanks Peter. I am completely out of onion and leek seeds. I am probably going to make an order with Holmes seed company. I am impressed with their selection and pricing that I have looked at so far.

[anon14613632]

Yeah, I agree. I just put together about 1/8 of a cup of carrot seeds. I used only the common cheap varieties that are widely available. My premium varieties, especially those with small quantities, were left for a safer planting period.

I missed the planting opportunity this week as we got a a good rain today. I will probably thinly plant these carrot seeds in the beginning of our false spring. If I time it correctly, I might be able to get these carrots established in a hot period of winter right before it drops low again.