Lots more winter coming

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square foot garden with four season protection

What a mess!  The days get longer, the snow is coming and it’s just freezing out there!  We awoke to a white Christmas with 5 inches of new snow!  We’ve got more on the way and we’ve also got a few nights dipping into the single digits!  The seed catalogs have arrived and I’ve been marking up every single one of them with all the fancy new things I want to try this upcoming year.

By the way-do you get Johnny’s catalog?  There’s this new item they have-Mexican Sour Gherkins.  They look so cool!  They’re miniature cucumbers that you harvest when 1″ long.  They taste like cucumbers with a citrus and tangy overtone.  Anyone ever tried them?  I noticed Niki Jabbour has talked about them on her Facebook site.  I’m not sure I’ll be growing them but they do look interesting.  I don’t know any neighbor gardeners who’ve grown them and I don’t know any square foot gardeners who’ve tried them.  I’d be interested to know if any of you have?  If so, let me know what you think.  I’m always up for trying new things but they have to be productive. The square foot gardener might not have a lot of room so space is at a premium-at least it is for me.

But the fun can begin right now if you’re ready!  If you’ve got your four season garden protection up there are things that you can plant-right now.  It’s true that many things are impossible to germinate in the winter, but there are 7 crops I’ve been successful with in the winter.  And with the empty spaces that are appearing in the garden because we’ve been eating out of it all winter, it’s time to replant.  And that’s exactly what I did this afternoon.

Don’t let the winter blues get you down.  There’s still much you can do!  Plantings of cold weather crops, collecting material to add to your compost bins,  and gathering seeds for the spring season are all fun activities to get you through the depressing winter months.

And even more, use the winter months to learn all you can about how to be a better gardener.  I ran across this nifty piece on twitter that I thought was informative.  Reading things like this all winter long will do nothing but add to your garden knowledge.  Hope you like it.  Cheers! [ois skin=”1″]

4 Season gardening at it’s best

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corn salad or mache in the four season garden

compost, 4 season gardening

Things doing well in my winter garden right now.  If you’ve never tried to have a 4 season garden you should reconsider-especially you northern climate gardeners.  It’s one of the most enjoyable times of all.  You end up harvesting crops that you can’t grow in the summer months because it’s too warm for them.  It forces you to eat seasonally.  This is mache, or corn salad depending on where you’re from.  The winter garden-no work.  I’ve begun harvesting this square which will last for a week.  I’ll snip some of this, and maybe some radicchio, and a little tatsoi for a delicious salad.  To increase your chances for success for the winter garden it’s important get the soil right by amending with quality compost and the right crop selection to match the season.[ois skin=”1″]

Winter garden lettuce

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winter garden lettuceFirst week of December and no garden work to do!  I’m very bored and anxiously awaiting the seed catalogs to show up in the mail.  The winter hasn’t been too bad yet-only a few inches of snow and about 10 days of below freezing temperatures.  This head of lettuce-it’s remained this size for close to a month.  And with the shortened days and colder weather, it won’t grow.  It will sit there and hibernate until it’s ready to be harvested.  My garden becomes a very large refrigerator for our family in the winter.  If you’re able to match the right crops with the right planting schedule, you can eat all winter long.  Four season gardening is very possible in zone 6 and I think it’s the most fun and enjoyable because there’s literally no work.  What could be better than that?[ois skin=”1″]

The good and bad of winter gardening

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arugula, winter gadeningThe good is you get some great food!  The bad is you lose some things along the way.  Like the summer garden, the winter has it’s own unique set of challenges.  In this picture you can see the flexible PVC that’s used to protect crops with floating row cover and plastic.  Because it’s so close to the plants, the outside edges of the garden box end are much colder than the middle. Notice the appearance of the outermost leaves. Now look at the condition of the arugula plant as you move to the middle of the box-where it’s doing quite well.  The trick is to give yourself room between the ambient air and your protection.  There isn’t much space to work with in this box, but there is on my other 4X16′ box.  My next post will show you what that looks like  and you’ll be able to see the spacing difference.  In the meantime, keep collecting that compost material from your kitchens.  It will be put to great use in a few months and you’ll be glad you did.[ois skin=”1″]

Composting

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compost ingredients 2014Making your own compost is a very easy thing to do-much like everything else in the square foot garden.  You can make it complicated by using formulas, ratio’s, etc, but it all really boils down to just doing a few things correctly .  Gathering the right kind of material is the first step.  The greater variety of ingredients, the greater the finished product will be.  Looking at this container shows a small sampling of how easy it is to gather compost material from your kitchen.  Here’s what I see: grapes, leeks, banana peels, eggs, tomato tops, apple core, zucchini, and an egg carton.  You can bet there’s more under what we do see, but that’s 8 different things, one of which is counted as a “brown” ingredient-the egg carton.  The way I do it is to simply balance the amount of greens with browns.  Seeing this is mostly green ingredients, I’ll dump this in the compost bin, and then I’ll fill the green container with nothing but brown items-something like shredded paper.  That way you’re assured of a good balance of nitrogen(green)and carbon(brown.)  Then it’s a matter of taking care of the pile-keeping it moist and turning it as often as you can.  The more  frequently you turn it, the faster you’ll get it.  I’ve done it this way now for 15 years and I’ve never had a problem.  I’ve never spent a dime on fertilizer and everything grows in my garden.  If you don’t get the soil right nothing else will really matter.

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