Tag Archives: corn salad

Winter planting the square foot gardening

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Winter gardening in northern Utah isn’t really gardening. It’s all harvesting. That means a little extra planning. The important point isn’t really the average first frost date but rather the first day we go under 10 hours of sunlight. For us, thats around November 14th. This is just one of my 4X4 SFG boxes planted for the winter. So far, the timing looks good. What’s in there? Lots. Three different kinds of lettuces, green onions, arugula, minutina, claytonia, spinach, turnips, mache, red pontiac potatoes, and tatsoi. They all love the cold and even freezing weather, except the lettuces. The baby leaf lettuces will easily make it right through the winter months. Get those gardens planted!!! 

Winterized square foot gardens

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You cant tell what’s under there now but you’ll see it when winter gets here. I have 2 or 3 empty squares left to plant for the winter garden, which will be radishes and corn salad at this point. We’ve had 2 hard freezes, and that’s made the carrots very sugar-like. My brother was visiting from California-I gave him one to taste. His comment: “I don’t remember ever tasting a carrot like this.” Thats what the winter garden is all about. Starches turning to sugar in a protective manner, kind of like the plants antifreeze system.

 

There’s not really a lot of new things in this years winter garden. The one new item I’m really looking forward to harvesting is parsnips. That, along with turnips, will make an excellent soup. Snow coming this weekend!

Winter garden makes it through

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This will be a short post about the tasks I’m doing now. Really, its all just preparation. This is the time to order seeds and to warm up your soil. We can still count on some snow and freezing temperatures but spring time is a couple weeks away.

For our climate, there is little advantage in planting before April 1st. I’ve done the experiments of planting on January and February 1st, Presidents day weekend, and the first week or two in March. When I compare that to what I plant the first week of April, it’s obvious that the extra work doesn’t get you much. Many of the crops don’t make it, and the ones planted in March easily catch up to those planted earlier.

I like to plant, spinach, chard, radish, bok choi, and some different kinds of Asian greens such as tatsoi and tokyo bekana. These are easy to grow and are direct seeded. April 1st marks the time for me to begin the summer crops: tomatoes, melons, cucumbers, and peppers.

The picture you see is the winter garden. I planted that in late summer, covered it, and did virtually no work. I don’t think I even looked underneath the cover for 2 months! Its loaded with claytonia, corn salad, green onions, rosemary, spinach, lettuces, etc. I’ll post this later in the summer time for those who want to learn how to do it, the timing, and the crops to grow successfully[ois skin=”1″]

Preparing for spring

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A little hard to believe-tomorrow we begin the first day of 10 hours of sunlight. This means we’ve come out of the Persephone period and plants will now begin to grow. It will be slow at first but will pick up as spring approaches. There’s still a lot of winter weather to deal with but the garden is ready to be warmed up. Some of the garden has been over-wintered and looks very good.

I usually begin covering my garden with plastic the first week of February so the soil will be ready to plant by February 17th. This year I’ll wait until the first week of March. The reason? I don’t seem to get ahead by the earlier starting date but it does add to my workload.

The next couple of weeks I’ll be selecting and ordering seeds. If you’ve been on my site much, you’ll already know my favorite places to buy. Johhny’s, Burpee, Jungs, and Territorial Seed. There’s a local place I like to buy from-Mountain Valley Seeds.

Crops I’ll be planting will be my regular early spring crops: several varieties of lettuce, spinach, claytonia, beet greens, tokyo bekana, corn salad, chard, bok choi, and maybe radicchio. My cool weather herbs have always been cilantro and chives[ois skin=”3″]

Square foot gardening-prepping for winter

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IMG_0050One month to go before the garden comes to a screeching halt! November 14-15 is the day us northern Utah gardeners dip below that magical 10 hours of daily sunlight. At that point everything almost goes into hibernation mode. I think I may have waited a little too long to plant some of my crops but we’ll see.

This weekend I’m hosting a low tunnel class. It’s short-only 30 minutes-but it will show the participants how to build a structure that will protect their gardens in the winter. Even if you don’t have a winter garden I think it’s a good idea to have it in place for the early spring garden. You will be the first in your neighborhood to start harvesting delicious salad greens and veggies. The cost of these tunnels are significantly less than the permanent, expensive, and costly structure we know as greenhouses. From start to finish the entire setup for my 4X16′ garden was slightly less than $100. And that will last me for several years. The only thing needing replacement is the most expensive item of the low tunnel-the plastic. Buy the UV protected 6-mil plastic. It will last at least 4 years if you take care of it. At least mine has. When I’m finished using it, I clean it off, roll it up, and place it in a location that gets no light. This will help preserve your plastic for as long as possible.

The picture is a crop called mache, or corn salad. It’s a weed that originally grew in the corn fields of Europe. Learn more about this crop here. The square foot gardening spacing for this is usually 16, but this particular variety says ‘thin to 4 inches.”  There’s a great picture of it fully grown on the left sidebar of my blog. It tastes a little different than the salad greens you’re used to but its a great crop to grow in the winter. And, it even germinates in the cold winter temperatures we experience. [ois skin=”1″]