A WINTER GARDEN
Jeffrey Best
After I read Eliot Coleman’s book, “The Winter Harvest Handbook”, this past summer, I was equipped with the necessary knowledge to attempt a winter garden. After mastering summer gardening, I was ready for this bizarre experiment.
My back yard garden area has approximately 100 square feet. In previous years, I planted cold hardy vegetables in mid-March. These withstood cold and snow and did well. So, with my newly acquired knowledge, I thought I would plant in the fall so that my vegetables would grow through the winter for continual winter harvest. With low expectations and lots of doubt, I started my experiment in September 2010, just a few days before the equinox. I planted in a small area of 3 feet by 4 feet. I pulled some productive bush bean plants and a lovely yellow nasturtium plant that was full of flowers. That hurt. I cleared my area and fertilized well. I planted scallion, spinach, lettuce, pac choi, carrots and kale. Over my new garden I placed my cold frame. I construct my cold frame with pvc pipe and connectors. It was still warm when I planted, so I left the plastic and frost cloth off until late September.
I planted before the first frost, and everything was thriving in the garden. My newly planted area was surrounded by mature plants. My cucumber and tomato plants were still producing. By October 9th, almost everything was dead from frost, yet small seedlings were coming up in the winter garden area. I started covering the cold frame with plastic at night which I removed each morning. I was expecting a lot from my spinach, but it disappointed me. I had to replant the spinach plants and cover them with wet burlap to get them to sprout. The spinach grew slowly after this.
By Thanksgiving, I was leaving the garden covered all of the time. Nights were very cold and the first snow had occurred. All winter garden plants were still alive and growing. Growth was slow for most of the plants. I’d obtained a small weather station the past summer. This works with a receiver in the house and a transmitter outside. The receiver shows the outside temperature. I placed the transmitter in the middle of the winter garden. Temperatures were ranging from 20 degrees to 70 degrees. The actual outside temperature was almost always at least 10 degrees colder. Since the winter garden was covered with frost cloth and plastic, it stayed much warmer.
Caring for the winter garden was a snap. It required much less attention than a summer garden. I watered once a week when the weather was good. I had no insect problems. This was a big benefit for the pac choi. In the spring, flea beetles had done a pretty good job of destroying my pac choi.
My biggest problem was keeping the cold frame from collapsing from strong winds and heavy snow. During snow storms, I went out and cleared the top of the cold frame every few hours. The weight of the snow collecting on the top of the cold frame punched a hole through the plastic. I patched this up with clothes pins.
The star of the winter garden was the pac choi. It was the first to sprout. I spread the seed in small clumps and these came up profusely. I thinned these out over time to 8 plants in 2 square feet. All of these were eventually consumed. I thinned these until I was left with 2 large pac choi plants by mid-winter. I harvested the last pac choi plant on February 8th. We enjoyed multiple batches of homemade pac choi soup in the fall and winter. My soup also included meat balls, green beans, flour dumplings, scallion and kale. I had frozen bags of beans and kale this past August that were grown in my garden. These also went into the soup.
You can grow vegetables in the winter in Flagstaff. I will grow another garden this coming winter, maybe just with pac choi this time.
(The Master Gardener Calendar is available at Warners and Native Plant & Seed.)
Jeffrey Best, a Master Gardener, is a Computer Programmer Analyst at NAU and works in the vegetable gardens at Dorsey Manor, the housing complex of the Sunshine Rescue Mission. Dana Prom Smith edits GARDENING ETCETERA, blogs at http://highcountrygardner.blogspot.com, and emails at stpauls@npgcable.com
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