How can I keep my vegetable garden going past frost?
Vegetable gardening doesn’t have to end with the first fall frost or even with the coming of winter. Many vegetables, such as spinach, bunching onions, lettuce, parsley, parsnips, carrots, corn salad, orach, Chinese vegetables, beets and radishes can survive the winter as long as a little care is taken.
Cold frames were invented for protecting crops from the cold and using them will allow you to grow and harvest your leafy greens throughout the winter with little effort. The sun provides the heat during the day and that heat can be retained through the night by stuffing burlap bags full of leaves and flopping them over the top each evening.
The good news is that cold frames don’t have to be formal structures and you certainly don't need to go to the expense of buying a pre-built unit. Informal designs work just as well as formal ones. I’ve been known to fashion cold frames out of plastic irrigation pipe bent into arcs and secured to the ground with re-bar before covering the structure with vapor barrier. Five minutes in a hardware store, an equal amount of time in the garden, and suddenly I have a simple structure capable of withstanding a snow load.
Even cool season plants won’t put on fresh growth during the coldest months, but they will stay alive and in relatively good condition through January and Feburary as long as the temperatures don’t get too arctic.
To continue harvesting your root vegetables though the winter, cover them with a thick layer of mulch before freeze up and the ground should remain diggable into January.
If your interest in extending the growing season has little to do with harvesting vegetables in the dead of winter and more to do with getting a few extra weeks out of your garden this fall, there are several ways to address this desire.
Row covers were designed to allow water and air to penetrate while retaining enough heat to buy you some time at either end of the growing season. If you want to protect individual plants, you can either make a cloche by cutting the bottom out of a plastic milk jug or make a teepee by leaning glass windows together.
If you have any questions or comments, please send them to me at vanessa@gardenmuse.ca.
Originally published in the Creston Valley Advance.
