Category Archives: Fall gardening

Prepping your square foot garden for winter and….

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Setting you up for major success in the next growing season. While my work for making compost is done for the year-at least the active part-there’s one last item that I’ve done for years to continue improving the tilth of the soil. 

If you live in an area where there’s freezing temperatures but can still work your soil it’s not too late. I remove 4-5 inches of soil, add a layer of fall leaves, and then put the soil back on top. When you come back in the spring to plant, you most likely won’t be able to find any leaves. The earthworms have been doing their job all winter long. 

This is a great way to continue improving your growing medium with a free and natural resource. Don’t throw those leaves away! Save and use as many as you can and then use the remainder next year to make the best compost around.

If you’d like to learn more about how to make that compost, you can find the recorded class available on this site under the “shop” section. You won’t be sorry. When you learn how to do it you’ll never need to buy another fertilizer again. Ever. 

Trick to growing massive amounts of anything

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I’ve been a little slow this summer with the blog. But it’s been a great year. We’ve had another record breaking summer of heat which is good for some things but not for others. My favorite-lettuce-is tough when it’s that hot. I’ve written an ebook that teaches you how to successfully do that. 

Now it’s fall and I’m wanting to have lots of salad greens into the deep winter season. The picture says it all. Put some potting mix in a small container. This one is 4X7″. Heavily sow your lettuce (or whatever you’re growing) seeds and cover lightly with soil. Do all the right things-water, providing light, proper temperature, etc. These were started indoors 5 weeks ago. When it’s time to plant outside, start breaking them up into pieces or “plugs” to drop in your squares. While I normally plant 4 lettuce plants per square, this method amplifies that. The end result is a square with a huge amount of lettuce in it. This is a new technique that I’ve started doing the past two season. I’ve planted 98 “plugs” from this one container.

For color, taste, and texture I’ve planted a few lettuce mixes that were just fabulous. All star gourmet, gourmet mix, tried and true heirloom mix,(huge surprise-buying lots more now) and lofty salad mix. I can’t put into words how wonderful they’ve tasted. 

Overwintered greens in the square foot garden

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Very late last fall I planted many squares with different things, mostly salad greens. I did something I’ve not done before during our winter season. I usually plant earlier and then use floating row cover until the temperatures get below 28 degrees. That’s when I then add a layer of 4 ml UV plastic over the row cover and leave that on for the winter. I’ll vent if it gets over 40 degrees and it’s sunny. For the most part it stays under both covers from late November until about March 1st, with just a few venting days.

This past year I used no plastic. I wanted to see if it could grow and come up as an early spring garden in our harsh winters using just row cover. It was a record snowfall/cold winter for us in northern Utah. I pulled the floating row cover back weeks ago. The lettuce weren’t as big as the picture shows but it was certainly growing. It made it right through the winter. Now I have this really early spring garden with delicious lettuces.

every night. Snip a few greens and it keeps coming back! For a while anyway. This is a true overwintered garden vs. a winter garden. They are different. 

Keep in mind that this will not work if you have freezing temperatures with big, mature heads of lettuce. It only works with baby greens that were started and got slightly established late in the season. One or two of the bigger heads of lettuce turn to mush after a freeze or two. We all were a little tougher when we were smaller, just like lettuces 🙂 

The efficiency of a square foot garden

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This might look like a boring picture but there’s a lot too see. The pole coming out of the ground was once a  very thriving cherry tomato plant growing vertically in only 1 square. That’s it. Our evening temperatures have been mid- low 50’s and that marks a change with tomatoes. It changes the  quality of the taste and they become mushy and begin to fall off. There were still a lot of green cherry tomatoes on the plant but there’s not enough time for them to ripen. 

Looking more closely, you’ll notice 3 areas of lettuce coming up in the front of the square. I planted this a couple of weeks ago so that it will be perfectly timed to grow before the freeze hits. It’ll only be baby lettuce leaves, but these hold up much better than their more mature lettuces which turn soupy after a couple of freezes. 

I want to make sure my new lettuces get all the sun possible at this time of year. If I pulled up the entire tomato plant it would uproot the lettuces which you see growing. So, I will simply cut off the branches and the lower stem and now I have a square that will grow into winter. I’ll leave the stem in the ground until the lettuces are harvested. 

Beginning in January, this single square housed 25 carrots, 9 spinach plants, an 8′ cherry tomato plant, and now 3 heads of leaf lettuce which will remain until late December or early January. 

Not bad for one square foot. I’ve got 174 of them. 🙂

An arugula story

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I’ve never liked arugula. It was always to spicy, too hot. I could pick it out of a mixed salad right away without even seeing it. 

One evening I was at a really nice restaurant where they had a set menu for the event I was attending. When I got there the salad dish had already been placed on the table. It was very good. I heard the server (old school = waiter) tell the person next to me we were eating a mixed arugula salad. What? I couldn’t taste that edgy salad green at all!

Sure enough, as I looked closer I could spot the arugula. I asked the server where they got it and he told me it was a commercial greenhouse operation about 20 miles to our west. I got the name of the business and gave them a call. While they did confirm they do service the restaurant I was at, they also told me they don’t grow the arugula-the get it from a farm in California. After pestering the person on the phone, she finally gave me the name of the farm-Earthbound. We all know Earthbound. 

I then called Earthbound Farms. I told them of my experience eating a salad I thought I would never like and how I was able to trace the product to them. I’m leaving out a lot of the story but this took a lot of detective work. I explained to Earthbound that I simply wanted to find out what variety of arugula they grew. “I’m sorry but that is proprietary information and we don’t give that out.” 

I told her I wasn’t a competitor and that I’m a simple home gardener living 800 miles away and am no business threat to them. It did no good. 

So I began trialing lots of different kinds of arugula over the years. After much time, I think I found the variety. If I didn’t, I can at least grow an arugula that I like which adds a nice touch to my mixed salad greens. 

It’s Astro arugula. But I still had some work to do as it still ended up with too much edge for me. Thinking back to my dining experience, this was during the holiday season. Cold. Chilly. Snow. The breakthrough was discovering that if you grow arugula in cooler weather and harvest it as a baby green, it looses a lot of the edge. That’s the secret to those who don’t like arugula because of it’s spice. Try growing Astro in the early spring and then again for a fall harvest. It really makes a big difference when grown in cooler temperatures.