Kristen and I decided we wanted to keep our gardening going through the fall and winter after the success of our spring/summer garden. Neither of us had ever planted cold weather plants before, so we were pretty excited to see how this would go. By the time we got our plan together and found some plants we wanted to try it was mid October. It hadn't gotten very cold here yet and we actually still had a few tomato plants still hanging on, so I built another raised bed to use. Having built the first one already, this one only took a few hours to knock out (and then we'd have two for the spring!). I went and got the dirt for our new bed (mix of top soil and compost) with my truck - I know none of you are used to seeing my truck, but believe me - she's weighed down to the max here!
It was a cubic yard of soil that pretty much completely filled my bed. The back end was a good foot lower than usual and the springs were basically fully compressed. I filled the bed a wheelbarrow load at a time (again, forget the gym, just build a garden) and went with the same basic design I used before:
The finished bed was ready to go, with twine marking out 1 foot squares and the PVC hoops you see ready to hold bird netting or frost blankets if it got really cold - I had no idea at the time how much I'd need that protection! Kristen pulled her usual magic in getting a plan together for planting and finding some excellent starter plants for us to transplant into our garden. By the time we got to planting it was October 22 - it was cooler in the mornings by that time but still warm in the middle of the day, and we hadn't had our first really cold snap yet.
After a solid weekend of planting we had our initial baby winter garden going! Here's a shot a few days after planting:
It's a bit hard to describe what's what because we decided to plant like plants in a zig zag pattern, interspersing the ones that will get large with smaller ones (lessons from our spring garden). But here goes. On the left side of the garden above, we have: something in the onion family (I'm convinced their green onions, Kristen thinks small bulb onions),
broccoli in the upper left section, cauliflower in the lower middle section, and carrots in between (the leafy looking ones). On the right side of the garden above, we have: brussel sprouts (or what we thought were brussel sprouts, more on that), red Swiss chard (you can see the red-pink stems), baby spinach at the bottom, and Buttercrunch lettuce on the right (a leaf lettuce variety).
We had our first big lesson in the difference between warm and cold weather plants about a week later. Our first big cold snap of the season hit, driving the night temperatures down into the lower 40's, with the day temperatures no higher than the upper 50's / lower 60's. Our tomatoes instantly deflated, but our winter garden plants all took off! Prior to this they had just been kind of sitting there - not failing, but not flourishing. As soon as it got really cold, everything started growing like crazy!
Here is the garden 15 days after the photos above:
And another 18 days:
And another 14 days:
In the interest of saving time and not boring everyone to death, I'll fast forward 2 months to mid-February:
I think we had a pretty successful run overall. It turns out that all these plants love the cold - if you can just keep them from freezing, they're fine otherwise. And that turned out to be quite the chore this winter - I lost track of how many times I had to trudge out there in freezing rain to put my frost blankets on the garden. Those PVC hoops paid for themselves many times over! But it was worth it - we had some great harvests from this one. Everything turned out really well, but the real stars for me were the Buttercrunch lettuce and the Swiss chard. As I mentioned earlier, Buttercrunch is a leaf lettuce variety (as opposed to a head variety like Romaine) - once the plant got established after a few weeks, I would go out and pluck 5-6 leaves off the outside ring from each plant, and without affecting the individual plants much at all, would end up with a salad for us like this:
The Swiss chard was equally bountiful - just run out, pluck a few stems off each plant, and suddenly you've got greens for dinner! Kristen just rough chopped them up (stems too), sauteed them in olive oil with salt and pepper, and maybe some garlic - delicious.
We had really good luck with the broccoli and cauliflower as well. They took a little while to really get going, but by the end of the season we had some really nice heads of those to harvest. Here are two main broccoli stalks just before Kristen turned them into ginger chicken and broccoli:
Liam was a great helper throughout the season, always wanting to help with whatever we were doing with the garden. He got especially excited any time it was ready to harvest something - this is one of my favorite photos of him right after we cut our first big cauliflower:
If anyone ever wondered what happens if you don't harvest cauliflower in time and just leave it on the plant, we found out. It goes from a nice domed head to something out of an early Star Trek episode:
So there's a quick overview of how our fall/winter garden went, a first for our family. I also took my nice camera out here and there during the growing season to capture some cool photos. If you'll permit me to get all artsy on you, here are some of my favorites.
