Moreover, cool season gardening is satisfying and a lot of fun – fewer bugs, cooler weather, usually more rainfall – the conditions are optimal, the air is crisp and cool and there’s just no reason to watch things peter out when you could be enjoying your garden until snowfly – or longer in many places.

But getting the timing right of fall crops can be complicated and takes practice, and learning what techniques work and don’t to extend your season, or how to deal with hot weather at planting time can be challenging, and this class is for people from beginners to advanced gardeners who still haven’t figured all this out.

Like all my classes, this one is online and asynchronous. It lasts four weeks, from July 7 to July 27.  You participate when you have time, and while I put up most of the week’s material on Tuesdays, I’m available regularly through the week.  The class includes weekly readings, lots of discussion and planning help and guidance, and one 15 minute phone conversation to talk about any questions or problems you are having, or strategize on designing how to get the most out of your garden.

Cost of the class is $100, and I have four spots still available for low income scholarship students. I ask that if you are applying for scholarship you give me a brief explanation of why you would qualify.    Anyone who would like to donate a part or whole of an additional scholarship spot can get in touch with me about that and 100% of the cost of your donation will go to making the class free for another low income participant.

To join the class or get more information, please email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com.  Here’s the syllabus:

Week I, July 6 – Introduction to the basics of cool season gardening and fall planting, garden planning, choosing varieties, estimating planting dates, finding space in your garden, designing for a three (or four) season garden.

Week II, July 13 – Introduction to Season Extension, strategies for extending your season, dealing with heat and cold, water and irrigation, cheap and dirty season extension techniques, timing for preservation.

Week III, July 20 – Cover cropping, using containers to extend the season, seed saving, Greenhouses, hoophouses and more advanced season extension, winter harvesting, recipes from a cool season garden, troubleshooting the fall garden.

Week IV, July 27 – Mulching, making the best use of small space, using vertical space in the winter, tropicals and pushing your zone hardiness limits,  Choosing perennials to extend the season,  Menus from the snow.

Cheers,

Sharon

And indeed, I am – because realistically, that’s more of us than anyone would like to admit.  It was me once – my first balcony garden, grown in college, failed because I didn’t realize you actually had to fertilize your plants – I dumped potting soil in pots and left them there, watering occasionally.  I’ve done every stupid thing you can imagine in a garden. 

So I’m delighted to offer some very basic gardening guidelines.  The couple asked to remain anonymous, so I’m referring to them (with their goodnatured consent) as “Ms. and Mr. Grasshopper” and will be answering their questions throughout the season.

The first one is what to read about gardening.  They went off to the local library and bookstore and came home with a bunch of books.  But, they admit, most of them are either too advanced or too confusing.  And they say such contradictory things – who should they believe?

And this does point up a real and serious problem in gardening – that in fact, most garden books do give wholly contradictory advice.   You’d think that someone who spends as much time as I do thinking about gardening would have a pile of just absolutely perfect authors, whose wisdom I agree with 100%.  in fact, I don’t have any such thing – the majority of garden books contain some good and useful information.  They also contain (in my opinion) some uninformed nonsense and some things that are helpful to some people, but wrong or pointless or irrelevant to people dealing with different pests, weeds, climates, soils or conditions. 

This is true even of gardening books I like.  And I assume that it will be deemed true if I ever write a gardening book.  The old joke about Jewish folks “Two Jews, three opinions” is even more true about gardeners.

So unfortunately, I can’t actually suggest to my Grasshoppers that they buy the one or two most useful garden books.  This would be very helpful to them, but instead, what I suggest is that they begin acquiring (or borrowing from the library) a range of books that will help them, remembering, also, not to take as gospel anything anyone says – including me.  This is much harder than giving the one true answer.  But anyone who says they have the one true answer in the garden is a liar or a fool.

So here is an opinionated, annotated list of the garden books I’ve found most useful. It is somewhat changed from the lists provided in _A Nation of Farmers_ and _Depletion and Abundance_, as I’ve read more books and changed my thinking some.  In each, I try to note what the book is actually good for, and if I can remember, where it is wrong.  I’ve included books that my Grasshoppers might not be ready for yet (and pointed out where this is true) in the interest of appealing to a broad range of readers.  But first we’ll start with absolute beginners:

Beginner Books

Mel Bartholomew’s _Square Foot Gardening_ has done more to make gardening accessible to more people than perhaps any other basic garden book out there, and is well worth the investment.  I actually think the older version of this book is better, because it emphasizes purchased inputs less than the more current one.  I think he uses more chemicals and purchased components than I like, but the basic method is very clear, very straightforward and very helpful. I don’t really think anyone should ever have just one garden book, but this wouldn’t be a bad candidate to get started with.

I wasn’t that excited by the title, but _The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vegetable Gardening_ is actually excellent.  Written by a father-daughter team, she a Garden writer, her father a retired Plant Biochemist, it somehow manages to get just the right balance of information.  The book is clear, it focuses on the food crops most people will want to start with, it covers everything you need to know from design to soil biology in very clear terms.  This book and Bartholomews are as close as I can come to imagining a small but comprehensive garden library.  It is good enough that the book will be a good addition to moderately experienced gardeners as well.

Robin Wheeler’s _Gardening for the Faint of Heart_ is more idiosyncratic and less comprehensive than either of the above, but is a nice supplement to them, and is about the most accessible and friendly of all garden books.  Think of it as a chatty companion with lots of information. 

Most gardening books are really regional – unless they are so general as to be useful only to the beginner.  The best of these are honest about who they apply to.  Bob Thomsen’s _The New Victory Garden_ is a superb basic book for people living in the Northeast, Northern Midwest and northern Mid-Atlantic – its advice is perfect for those regions, but since my Grasshoppers do live in the Midwest, this will be a good addition to their list.  One of the best things about this book (based on the old PBS tv series available cheaply, but don’t get the old Crockett’s version, which is heavy on the pesticides) is that it will tell you what to do in each month to get your garden started.

My Grasshoppers see the proper beginning place for them as a fairly conventional annual garden of popular vegetables, but that isn’t necessarily the only or best way to go.  I’d like them to think at least a little about permaculture and designing a space that does more than produce annuals with a maximum of effort. For that, I think the single best “help people see the basics differently before they get locked in” book is Toby Hemenway’s wonderful _Gaia’s Garden_.  I recommend this for every household, even if you don’t think you want to know about permaculture.  You really do – and this is a superb book that will get you thinking in the right terms.

These five books, put together are a very good start for most beginners.  Those in other regions of the world will want to find an equivalent basic regional book for their area.

Containers:

My Grasshoppers have a moderate sized yard, but they have most of their sun in the front, and want to add some containers to their plan – but they don’t know what grows well in containers, how to fertilize or take care of them.  So the next category of garden book I’m going to recommend are books on container gardening – which is tricky, since most container garden books focus on just a few edible plants and mostly on flowers.  I like four books, personally. 

First, there’s _McGee and Stuckey’s The Bountiful Container_ – which covers a really nice range of container plants, soils, fertility and how to grow them.  This is really *the* comprehensive reference on the subject, and if you had to pick one book, this would be it.  I don’t think they spend quite enough time on soils and micronutrients but otherwise, it is good.

I like DJ Herda’s new book _From Container to Kitchen_ quite a bit, in part because he really includes some suggested interesting crops – I’m excited by his section on growing dwarf bananas in pots.  But rest assured, he also takes good care of basics – beans, cucumbers, tomatoes.  He’s an opinionated guy, and I disagree with a few of his recommendations – but in some ways opinionated gardeners (especially when their opinions are leavened with humor, as his are) are the best – because all gardeners are opinionated, but some conceal it under a veneer of scientific expertise, implying that there is only one true way. I like that Herda comes out and makes the case for his way.  It isn’t quite the Bible that the Stuckey and McGee book is, but it add something to the other.

If you are growing serious food in containers, sooner or later you’ll want to investigate self-watering containers, also known as earth boxes.  Because water and fertility stress aren’t the constants they are in most standard containers, this is a great way to up your container yields.  The standard book on the subject is Edward Smith’s _Incredible Vegetables from Self-Watering Containers_.  The problem I have with the book is that there really isn’t enough content in it to make a real book – it is stretched out with irrelevancies and huge pretty pictures that only emphasize that this good and valuable information really could have been contained in a pamphlet, rather than its own book.  It is a helpful guide to this technique, however, so it is worth reading. I’m glad I own it, mostly, although I think most of us could glean the relevant parts from a single borrow from the library.

_Fresh Food from Small Spaces_ by RJ Ruppenthal is a great book for urban folk or others with small spaces that want to maximize what they can do even in the city.  It isn’t wholly a gardening book, much less a container gardening book - it covers bees and chickens, fermentation and sprouting as well.  But it is a terrific book, and has some great ideas for using vertical spaces and found containers, enough that I’d add it to the list.  It is readable and passionate sounding, which alone makes it more fun than many garden books.

Weeds:

Being a Gardener means being a weeder – we pay lots more attention to planting and harvesting, but a lot of the day to day reality of gardening is simply keeping ahead of the weeds.  There are lots of strategies for doing this, and this is one place where folks get more opinionated than not.  My opinion comes down to two things – don’t let them get away from you, and mulch the crap out of them.  So that informs my books.

The first book you definitely want is a guide to your weeds – the more you know about weeds, the easier they are to manage.  My personal favorite is a pricey book that I bought some years ago, but have never regretted called _The Weeds of the Northeast_ (this kind of book doesn’t seem to lend itself to innovative titles ), but you will want whichever weed book best applies to your region of the world. I don’t know where most of you live, so I can’t offer a suggestion – call your cooperative extension agent and ask them.

The two other books I recommend on this subject basically both take the same approach, and you can easily get away with just one, depending on your tastes.  I like Ruth Stout’s old _How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back_ for the entertaining essays and Lee Reich’s more concrete and analytic approach in _Weedless Gardening_ for the nitty gritty.  Mulched gardening is not rocket science, and you can learn it from either, but the two together make a wonderful combination.  Weedless Gardening is also a pretty good basic book on gardening as well.

Seeds

My Grasshoppers are purchase transplants for everything they can’t direct seed this year, because they are getting a late start, but eventually, they will probably find it financially friendlier to start at least some seeds in advance.  They may also find that they’d like to save seeds, and cut down on their seed bill for next year, as well as building local adaptation into their plants.  So once they get that far, they’ll want a couple of books on seeds, and maybe the very basics of backyard plant breeding.  I know that sounds overwhelming now, but again, it isn’t rocket science, and you go from raw beginner to expert, aching for a new challenge pretty quick in gardening.

For beginners who haven’t gotten to seed saving, I like Nancy Bubel’s _The New Seed Starter’s Handbook_ which has tons of specific information about every variety of vegetable, herb and flower you  could want, laid out very clearly. 

The best seed starting and saving book, however, is Suzanne Ashworth’s superb _Seed to Seed_ which covers the whole cycle of seed saving and spreading for a huge range of edible plants.  If you can only have one book on this subject, this is it.

In addition, even if it sounds intimidating, I love Carol Deppe’s _Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties_ – it is readable, entertaining, compelling and useful, and a great book.  It makes it clear that the work of creating new food plants that can adapt to changing conditions will not be left only to plant scientists – it can’t be, because we are the ones who know what we need. I recommend everyone read this book (once you get past the starting stage) even if you think you’d never do it. You won’t regret it.

More than Just Veggies

What happens when my Grasshoppers are ready to go beyond the most common fruits and vegetables and want to get into new plants?  Well, then they need some guidelines to less familiar plants – perennials, fruits, herbs, etc…  Depending on their interests, they may want some of these specialized books – and indeed, I will encourage them, once they’ve gotten their hands into the dirt for the first time, to add perennial and woody plants to increase the food they can produce.

If you want to grow medicinal herbs, there’s really one definitive book – Tammi Hartung’s excellent _Growing 101 Herbs that Heal_ – everyone may want to add basic medicinals or specific to conditions they or their family are dealing with, and while there are many herb books that focus on how to use the herbs, books that really emphasize how to grow them are few and far between. This is a wonderful one and I consult mine regularly.

What about grains?  Most of us rely on grains to provide staple calories, but few of us grow them, which is a pity, since most grains are grasses and very easy to grow.  Thankfully, Gene Logsdon has finally re-released the definitive and wonderful _Small Scale Grain Raising_ which was out of print for decades.  Revised and updated, it is an essential for anyone who wants to grow even a tiny patch of grains.

Michael Phillips’ _The Apple Grower_ is the modern definitive book on organic apple growing, and is wonderful – and much of what he says applies to other tree fruits grown organically.  Gene Logsdon has an out of print book _Organic Orcharding_ that is also excellent, and covers a wider range of fruits – I’m hoping that will be his next re-release.

If you are going to grow unusual fruits, I come back to Lee Reich, whose _Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden_ will help you sort through fifty different kinds of faux-cherry in your catalog and whether you want to grow Medlars. 

Eric Toensemeier’s super _Perennial Vegetables_ is also well worth the investment – he’s done the hard work of sorting through unusual and funky, even unknown vegetables in order to give everyone access to a range of crops that come back every year without effort.  Familiar rhubarb and asparagus are here, along with the unfamiliar, and it is worth having and considering.  This is another one I go back to year after year.

Getting More Advanced

Believe it or not, at some point terms like “soil ph” and “cruciferae” and “woody perennial” will turn from mystifying bits of an alien language into the ordinary terms of your day to day life.  You will know that blueberries need acid soil and not to set your peppers out until it gets warm and what damping off disease is.  A few seasons under your belt and you’ll recognize your seedlings from the weedlings and while you won’t stop making garden mistakes, you will probably go looking for some new and creative ones to make.  That’s when you need these books – the ones that help you take the next step on, whether it is market gardening, season extension or serious forest gardening or just a greater degree of self-sufficiency.

Eliot Coleman’s _The New Organic Grower_ is *the* book for small scale market producers, but larger scale home gardeners will learn a lot from it as well.  The discussions of green manures, undercropping, appropriate tools and technologies, soil building, etc…are past the level of a beginner, and for people who are really ready to get serious about gardening.  Like all of Coleman’s books, it is a well written and thoughtful tome

Also by Coleman are the two bibles of Season Extension – _The Four Season Harvest_ and _The Winter Harvest Handbook_ – the two build on one another, and talk about ways of extending the garden season year round in cold climates.  This book will be less valuable for folks in hot places, but for those in cold and moderate temperate climates they are indispensible.  If you had to get one, I’d get The Four Season Harvest.

Dave Jacke is a brilliant man who has written an enormous two volume book on Forest Gardening in temperate climates.  These are amazing books, and incredibly useful references even if what you are doing isn’t officially forest gardening – his plant information is astonishing, and the tables alone are worth the price of the book. I don’t, however, recommend them to beginners – or even folks who are still in the first few years of gardening, unless you really like anality.  The thing is, Jacke is so focused on doing it right – hundreds and thousands of pages of doing it right… that I think it is simply overwhelming to beginners who want to deal with smaller spaces.  Jacke knows his stuff cold, but by the time you finish reading all the steps in soil prep and design, you probably will have decided that this whole thing is far too overwhelming.  But once you’ve gotten past that, and are actually doing, they are wonderful books – very expensive, but worth the price.

I’m not a double digger, and I actually don’t think that highly of double digging as a technique – I know too many people who set out to use the techniques in _How to Grow More Vegetables…_ by John Jeavons and were knackered by the construction of the garden beds, and never did end up growing much.  If, however, you have many unrebellious teenagers to use as slave labor who need to sublimate sexual frustration, or you like double digging, you could build a large garden of double dug beds.  Or you could actually derive all the good and powerful knowledge in here about crops but maybe give yourself a little bit of a break.  I do think that outside of California, the yields are probably overstated, but even doubling their expected space gets you a lot of food in a small place.  Ecology Action also publishes a number of culture and climate specific garden pamphlets “A Complete Mexican Diet” “A Complete Kenyan Diet” that may be useful in many places outside California.  Their work is wonderful and the book enormously valuable, even if I don’t think you actually need to sit around and sift your soil through screen to two feet deep.

Finally, I have a particular taste for Terry and Mark Silber’s _Growing Herbs and Vegetables from Seed to Harvest_ because they are doing  so much of what I want to do.  This is a largely idiosyncratic choice, and if you aren’t trying to grow herbs and flowers along with vegetables, you might not find this book that interesting.  But it shows what they do on their farm to grow an extremely diverse range of crops, and I find it a very useful supplement to Coleman and the others, as well as doing a good job of actually illustrating what they are doing, rather than just showing garden porn (not that I don’t like garden porn, but pretty pictures aren’t everything.)

There you have it, Grasshoppers, your reading list.  More to come!

Sharon

 All my first garden experiences were up on balconies 2, 3 or 4 stories above the street.  Let’s also note that none of these buildings had elevators, so I can remember precisely what it took to carry all the container soil mix I ever used up those stairs.  Still, it was worth it – I loved my balcony container gardens, and grew everything from strawberries and roses to zucchini and tomatoes.  I never got out of the habit, and right now there’s a jungle of containers growing everything from hen and chicks (which I grow just because I like it) to sungold tomatoes, from gotu kola, lemon verbena and rau rom and other tropical herbs to purple orach, jalapenos, eggplant, carrots and kale. 

I’ve also got self-watering containers that hold larger plants – tomatoes, okra and sweet potatoes.  When pots spring leaks or boots get worn out, I’m likely to stuff them with soil and let something grow in them.  I’ve got the habit of putting things into pots, and I couldn’t do without them – particularly because they are one of my best season extension tools.

I can get a significant jump on the season by planting out into containers, early, since the containers can so easily be covered up or brought into the house to avoid a late frost.  My first harvest of tomatoes, peppers and eggplant always come from pots, sometimes as early as the fourth of july for the tomatoes.  These same plants are often the last ones producing into the winter, as the potted cherry tomatoes are brought under cover for a few weeks of late harvest. 

I am fortunate to have a deep, sunny, south facing window in my living room, and that area is reserved for the most beloved of my indoor plants that provide me with food and flowers all winter long.  My house is extremely cold – that spot is often in the 50s, so precludes some heat lovers, but my citrus plants, a few overwintered tomatoes and peppers (which won’t produce anything over the winter, but which will get started very early in the spring), my rosemary, scented geraniums and a few other beloved plants get that precious spot. 

But you don’t have to have southern exposure to overwinter plants indoors – a surprisingly large number of plants will take eastern or western exposures – my lemon verbena, for example, does rather well in a partly occluded western exposure, and I can overwinter begonias and my beloved “Hidcote Beauty” fuschia with northern exposures (I know, they aren’t food, but flowers in winter have value too!).  Food plants that will tolerate lower light conditions include many greens (which produce happily on my very cold, east facing sunporch), turnips and beets (which can be forced to produce greens even in north facing windows – just put them in a pot of mixed sand with a a little compost, and keep harvesting leaves all winter), and peas, which won’t produce any peas, but will produce delicious pea shoots in an eastern or western exposure indoors in pots.

Any shelter at all – even being backed up against a sunny wall – will extend your season somewhat most years.  Cold tolerant parsley, mache and arugula often over winter for me in my mudroom, set on top of the piles of firewood and taken in to be watered occasionally.  This is by no means draft proof or warm, but they are not fussy creatures.

With container plants, I can have my first tomatoes in July and my first hot peppers a week or so later – early season salsa.  I can keep African Basil going all winter long, and drink lemon vebena tea, picked that morning.  I can place flowers on my sabbath table.  I can harvest greens until January, and then start again in March from my unheated porch.  I can overwinter tender plants – from the fig that lives on my unheated porch to the citrus plants that would rather have warmer, but who grumpily give me lemons to enjoy all winter.

It does take some experimentation to learn to overwinter plants in containers – one needs to harden off plants coming into the house, just as one hardens off plants outside – the plants have been used to moister air and more sun, so gradually shift them indoors.  Selecting varieties for container growing is an art in itself – some plants respond very well, others not so much.  Often plants bred for containers do better, but it is always worth trying new things.  Look for “dwarf” “space saving” and “suited to container growing” in descriptions in catalogs.

I’ll write about greenhouses next, but it is important to realize that you don’t have to have a greenhouse – even an apartment with an east/north exposure can have window boxes with plants that are protected to extend their season by a few weeks or a month.  Even a north facing window can grow some food plants, and some beauty.  We are going to have to adapt our houses to help provide us food in cold and dry times of year if we want fresh things – beginning the process of adaptation by bringing in some things for winter is one way to take a step forward.

 Sharon

Ok, revisiting *this* planet, the one I actually live on, and the one that’s already suffering because crazy people want to live in the tropics when they don’t,  what I’d really like is an attached greenhouse on the cement slab that comes off my kitchen.  But the slab would have to be insulated and we’d have to find the money and the time to build it, which may happen eventually, but has not yet done so.  What I’d grow there would be cool season vegetables and seedlings in the spring.

Or I’d like a hoop house.  This is more viable, but requires some infrastructure work we haven’t gotten to yet.  My goal there would be to keep things over the winter in large beds, and maybe eventually go back into the CSA business, this time in winter.  But I don’t have that either.

I mention all these things I *don’t* have because I think it is important to realize how even in many quite cold climates, it is possible to use very simple, very low cost strategies to extend your season.  Despite all these things that I don’t have, let me tell you what I do have:

- I have fresh green vegetables grown by us from March to December or January, every single year.  This is in upstate NY, where our winter lows hit -30.  First frost is early October, last is usually late May.

- I overwinter produce every single year, including both hardy root crops and greens like kale, spinach, leeks, etc…

- I have two lemon, one keffir lime and one orange tree, a fig and a pomegranete, along with many smaller tender plants.

- I have fresh things of high nutritional value to eat all year round, produced here.

 - I start virtually every single one of my seedlings here, in the house, and use only a couple of hanging lights.  I use no lights in overwintering my tender plants.

- I have nursery beds for starting hundreds of perennials, fruits trees and berries over the winter.

I mention all this to give people a sense of what is possible with very little effort or input.  My tools for doing this include:

- Two “pop up” greenhouses (ie, they can be set on top of a raised bed or flat crops, one little stand up greenhouse (ie, a plastic cover over a plant rack that sits on a porch.

- Self-watering containers on a poorly insulated sun porch

- some greenhouse plastic and old window frames and some floating row covers

- Lotsa mulch and bales of hay

- My unheated, uninsulated garage

- A couple of south facing windows

- Willingness to experiment

I’ll talk more next week about growing food indoors during the winter, and making use of your home – this week I want to talk about simple structures to extend the season outside the house.  Now obviously, this won’t work the same for everyone – someone, for example, who lives in a much colder climate may not be able to overwinter anything – but they might be able to use the same techniques to get a month or two more growing season.  In other places,  you could do most of what I do outside without any of these things.  But the techniques themselves should be available for you to consider and evaluate.

 So what are some of these?  Well, the first one I can think of is mulch – yes, plain old mulch.  If you live in a cold climate, where the ground freezes, insulating the ground so that it doesn’t freeze, or doesn’t freeze as deeply can keep plants going a surprisingly long time.  Deep mulch on dormant plants marginal or not usually perennial in your climate, for example, can allow you to grow many perennial plants you didn’t think you could grow.  Eric Toensmeier grows hardy bananas in Massachusetts with deep mulch (think a bale of straw or two).  Less extreme, I’ve overwintered rosemary outside in good years and maintained a Maypop.    Figs can be overwintered with deep enough mulch (ie, enough to cover the whole plant in dormancy, wrapped well to keep the mulch on in winter winds.  Mulch is often underrated – your carrots, your beets will survive, if not a whole winter, a surprisingly long time with enough mulch.  This only works with plants that are either perennial or root crops, generally – eventually lack of light will kill everything else, but that covers a surprisingly large number of items.

Next up – the crazy easy solutions – cut the bottom off a plastic milk jug (dug out of someone’s recycling bin, of course) and put it over a favored plant.  Add a few stakes and a piece of plastic sheeting or a floating row cover, and enjoy a month’s extra time with your greens.   Stuff will also do better in sheltered spots or microclimates – that place along the edge of the driveway that is too hot for much of anything in summer will be just the spot for the stuff you want to overwinter.

There are lots of products out there to help you, including regular and fleecy row covers, cloches, and there are plenty of little greenhousey things you can buy.  These can be helpful, but make sure you are getting good quality stuff – you want heavy duty plastics designed to tolerate sunlight and snowload (if that’s relevant), and not to wear out, or row covers with long term lifespans.  Using plastics and petroleum based solutions can be acceptable, if you are getting a decent return out of them and they are the best available option – but using cheap plastics and replacing them every year is worse in many cases than transporting food from warmer places, so choose wisely.  I like the stuff sold by Johnny’s Selected Seeds www.johnnyseeds.com for season extension.

The cold frame is a great tool, and my favorite model is the easiest to build – the hay bale cold frame.  TAke four or six or however many bales of last year’s hay or straw (that has been kept dry).  Lay out the bales in a rectangle around an existing bed, or fill them halfway up with soil and compost.  Take a window or old glass door (do not use anything that might have old lead paint on it, ever) that fits over the top, and cover it up.  Tah dah!  This kind of frame almost never overheats, because the bales don’t fit together tightly enough to prevent air from being vented, but the bales also insulate the soil well enough that things overwinter beautifully.  And in the spring, after a winter of sitting there, all the mulch is nicely decomposing and makes great organic material for your garden, and is already right where you want it.

This trick is tough if you have to put it in the front yard of your suburban neighborhood, so you might want to build a cold frame that looks prettier, like this: http://www.doityourself.com/stry/oldwindowuses

You can also use a hotbed – this is a cold frame, filled with uncomposted manure, mixed with high carbon material, where the heat of composting keeps a cold frame or open bed warmer than it would be otherwise.  The composting material is covered with a layer of soil to keep the plants from being cooked, and the hotbed provides warm soil in cold times.  Because the heat of decomposition gradually declines, you will want to use this for short term, rather than long term warmth, to keep something going longer or to get a fast maturing crop ready.

There are lots of cheap greenhouse plans out there – I’ve not enough experience to know which are good, but I do have some concern with many of them in places that experience heavy snow loads – I’ve seen too many collapsed hoophouses and plastic greenhouses around here, and all are too expensive and resource intensive to be used for only one season.  This design  http://www.kountrylife.com/articles/art1.htm seems sturdier than some of the cheap options I’ve seen (note, I am *not* advocating that you use their resource intensive strategy of electric heat (ugh!) and lights, just that I think the design is a bit better than some cheap options I’ve seen) but again, make sure you are doing something that will last, unless you are using all used and scavenged materials that would otherwise be landfilled.  I don’t want to see a lot of people investing time and money in new 6 mil plastic and concrete, only to waste them and their embodied energy.

If you can afford a serious greenhouse, well, I’m jealous .  There are a lot of options out there, from simple hoophouses to serious glasshouses that really do look like the Restoration era glasshouses of my dreams .  I’ll cover greenhouse options next week in a separate post.  This is about the cheap and dirty options – ones that get you a lot of food.

 Sharon

Here are some of my own observations about growing here, in zone 4/5 (5 official, 4 for elevation), on my wet, thin soil in my wet, cold climate .  I had a good chance to experiment with varieties during the years we ran our CSA.

Best cold tolerant salad greens: Forellenschuss, Winter Density,  and Marvel of Four Seasons Lettuces, Mizuna (too bad I find the taste boring), all arugulas, vit and big seeded maches, beet greens (start a new crop since the little ones are best), sorrel, any mustard, pinky lettucy gene pool mustards.

Best spinach: Vert and Bloomsdale Winter

Best cold tolerance in broccoli: Umpqua (OP) and Blue (Hybrid)

Best cold tolerant root varieties: Flat of Egypt and Lutz Longkeeper beet, all parsnips, Diamante Celeriac, Golden Ball and Purple Top White Globe Turnip, Oxheart and Meridia carrots (the latter are designed for overwintering – they didn’t quite for me, but did very well), any salsify and scorzonera, Gigante Kohlrabi.  Also Yellow Mangels lasted quite a long time in the ground for me – and I thought they were tasty, if a little mild.  Goats liked ‘em too.

Best fall producing pea varieties: Alderman (tall vine shelling) and Sugar Ann (snap)

Best cold tolerant leek: Blue de Solaize

Best cold tolerant favas: Lorraine

Best cold tolerant cabbages and kales – All kales  (red and white russian  are pretty hardy – red has even overwintered for me, but they do winterkill before the Tuscan and Siberians for me), Coeur de Blue, Glory of Enkhuizen, Stein’s Late Flat Dutch Cabbage, Even’star Collards, Vates Collards

Best Mustard: Osaka Purple and Green Wave

Best tomatoes for overwintering in pots: Red Robin, Balconi Yellow

Best hot peppers for overwintering in pots: Fish (this is the only one that doesn’t end the winter looking sad), Korean Dark Green, Thai Hot

Best basil for overwintering: African Blue

Best eggplant for overwintering – Pingtung Long, Fairy Tale

Ok, how about the rest of you?  Share your wisdom!

 Sharon

 One of the first tricks to use is the same one we cold climate folks use to get our plants ready in winter – start the seeds indoors.  This obviously is only true if some part of your house is cooler than the outside, but since that is the case for many of us, find the cool spot and plant your seedlings there.  Up to a certain point, larger seedlings with more extensive root systems will handle transplant better, with a good, moist start.  This isn’t bad advice for those of us up north, either, when dealing with particularly light sensitive plants that are prone to bolting – some of these, like many asian greens don’t transplant well, but us northerners who are often our fall crops at the height of the long days don’t want to see them bolt immediately – so growing them inside, where they get less, but sufficient light may actually give them a boost.

 Another thought are shady beds, particularly under deciduous trees.  One of my best garden beds is under a large white paper birch that shades our kitchen window.  It is a lovely tree, with the added virtue of leafing out late and losing its leaves early – so it allows in the sun while we want it, and cools the house when we don’t.  I plant greens in these shaded beds, and they do well all summer, and then as things get cooler, enjoy the burst of additional light that puts on new growth in the fall.

You can make structures out of shade cloth, or if you don’t have shade cloth, make something out of an old, threadbare sheet and some bits of wood lying around.  You have to move it on and off, but the difference in temperature and light absorption can be critical. 

Mulch is powerful here – not only does it help soils retain water, but it also keeps them cooler than they would be without it.  Straw mulches are particuarly valuable because they reflect light back, rather than absorbing it. 

Even a piece of board can make a big difference if you are germinating seed in hot weather – water deeply and cover the row of seeds with a board and check daily for germination, removing the board as soon as the seed are up.

Moisture is critical – transplants or seeds will do poorly if allowed to dry out before their root systems can reach down into deeper subsoils.  Consider making trenched garden beds – instead of raising your gardens up, if your climate is warm and dry, make them in low ground, where moisture can pool.  Water regularly, ideally directly at root level, particularly when seedlings are young. 

Look for varieties that can take some heat as well as cold – those in warmer climates than ours may not struggle as much to overwinter greens  – thus, instead of planting winter density lettuce, you might do better with thai green or marvel of four seasons, both of which have some bolt resistance built in.  Several people mentioned that “ice bred” plants didn’t do well for them in their warm climate – I’d tend to expect that – if the plants get stressed early, and are bred mostly for tolerating cold, they probably won’t do well over the winter where the falls are long and warm. 

This means a certain measure of experimentation – don’t assume, if you live in Oklahoma or Georgia, that what you want are the cold hardiest varieties – you may instead what something that generally does well in your area.  If you have the space, do variety trials and compare – this information will be enormously valuable to your neighbors and friends nearby, and may be useful to your local cooperative extension and any local seed companies.

If you can, wait to transplant seedlings until you can expect some moisture and cooler weather.  If that isn’t possible, harden your plants off, just as you would if you were planting them out in springtime in a cold climate – gradually accustom them to getting a little bit dryer, and put them out initially in a shady spot, only gradually moving up to the amount of light they’ll get. 

Season extension for hot climates – that is, finding ways to extend the season through the warm, dry periods, seems to me less fully developed in gardening literature than cold season gardening.  I realize that some of this information is available locally, but it seems less well dispersed – and yet, making sure that food keeps coming through the hot dry seasons when little grows is just as esssential as storing for winter.  Balancing the two – timing the fall crops around the heat of summer, is a delicate balancing act.

 Sharon

 - Transplanting cabbage and brussels sprouts started at the beginning of June

- Transplanting a mid-season crop of lettuce

- Eyeing my garlic, and looking greedily at its space, so that when it comes out I can immediately replace it with something else. 

-Starting the next crop of lettuce from seed indoors (inside, because it is cooler there, to keep it from early bolting).

- Transplanting the next crop of broccoli

- Thinning the broccoli that will produce latest in the season (we eat a lot of broccoli)

- Starting peas from seed in newspaper or coir pots

- Starting Marshmallow, Valerian, Meadowsweet, joe pye weed and other wetland herbs from seed – they will be second year annuals next summer (this may not apply to other people who don’t want large quantities of these crops, but also would work for any perennial flower you might want, as long as it gets settled in before frost.

- Planting a late crop of scallions and lutz winter keeper beets.

- Thinning the rutabagas and keeping the weeds out of the parsnips

- Planting a late crop of cornichon cucumbers and one of bush beans for preserving

- Planting napa cabbage for my fall kimchi

- Building a hay-bale raised bed for my carrots, so they can have the loose, sandy soil they crave, rather than the rocky stuff that came with my property.  Carrots will get planted next week.

 - Underplanting red and white clover among my crops as a living mulch and cover crop.

- Sowing buckwheat as a cover crop.

- Adding composted chicken manure to the as yet unreadied section of the garden on which I will be planting more stuff next week.

Other stuff will have to wait until next week – the last fall planting will start at the beginning of September, when the last crop of radishes, spinach and arugula go in.  But that’s getting ahead of myself.

 Sharon

Category #1 – Long warm season annuals suitable to season extension by container planting: These include the true perennials that can be brought in and overwintered, like peppers and eggplants of normal size and dwarf tomatoes. There are other plants that could be brought in, but these are the most common.  Generally it is now too late to start these from seed, but there’s no reason not to plan for next year.

Category #2 – True perennials that do well in pot culture and can provide overwintered herbs, fruit or other good stuff.  Look for varieties that do well in pot culture.

Category #3 – This is a small one, but these are warm season annuals that are bred to produce good keeping varieties of things not ordinarily good keepers, or to be harvested green late in the season before first frost, and ripen gradually, like Burpee’s Longkeeper Tomato or the Banana Melon.

Category #4 – Warm season annuals with short growing season – bush beans, cukes, summer squash, etc… that can be planted later in the season for succession crops.  You should look for varieties that do well in short seasons.

Category #5 – Vegetables that are naturally cold tolerant – brassicas, asian greens, lettuces, mustard, non-tropical root crops, that cannot be overwintered in cold climates but can do well for an extended season or in storage after late harvest.

Category#6 – Vegetables suited to true overwintering in cold climates – including varieties bred specifically for this purpose.

 Now which category your stuff falls into is somewhat fungible. Someone growing vegetables in the Pacific Northwest will find that Category #6 includes an awful lot of stuff – you may be able to overwinter fava beans and peas, things that just don’t work here in zone 4/5.  Some people simply won’t be able to overwinter anything – the ground freezes too  hard. 

Now, seed sources. It will probably not surprise you that the best seeds for this purpose come mostly from a. companies in cold places that are dealing with the problem of cold weather all the time anyway and b. from places where winter gardening is something of a tradition, due to a mild year-round climate like the Pacific Northwest and Britain.

 I think Fedco Seeds www.fedcoseeds.com is probably the best source of overwintering, super cold-hardy seeds – their “ice bred” arugula, “evenstar” mustards and collards and other breeds of greens specifically for cold season production have been some of my best producers.  They also carry a lot of winter standards – Bloomsdale LongStanding spinach and Winter Density Lettuce.  If you are ordering from them, order early, because it can take them several weeks to send out orders in the summer, when they work with a skeleton staff.

 Johnny’s Selected Seeds are pricey, but they put a lot of effort into research on cold season gardening, and consult directly with Eliot Coleman on some things.  They are a great source of chicories for winter forcing and a solid supplier of obscurities like salsify and scorzonera (probably too late to start them from seed this year, though). www.johnnyseeds.com  They have the advantage of being employee owned as well, and thus you are supporting something good.

 You have to page through Richter’s herb catalog carefully to find them, but they do include a fair amount of information about herb varieties suitable for pot culture, and sell, among other things plants of tropical basils that can handle low light conditions, and Rau Om, a Vietnamese Cilantro taste-alike that will overwinter happily.  They are in Canada, but do international orders:  www.richters.com

Seed Savers Exchange is always the best first source for me, and I strongly urge all my readers to become members.  But even if you don’t join, you can still order from their catalog, which includes a lot of fascinating varieties designed for keeping – here are banana melons and Longkeeper tomatoes, and beets, turnips and garlic that store especially well.  Remember, many of the older heirlooms were bred in an era where much of summer’s bounty went into the root cellar for winter. www.seedsavers.org

Thompson and Morgan is a British company with US/Canadian and Aussie sites that has a number of container gardening plants, and also some good, cold hardy varieties that are hard to find here in the US.  US site: http://www.tmseeds.com/  Britain: http://www.thompson-morgan.com/

 Container Seeds was founded by our own wonderful Pat Meadows, she of so many wise things like “The Theory of Anyway” and the Edible Container Gardening Yahoo List – she no longer runs it, but she wrote most of the product descriptions, and the site is still operating under different ownership.  www.containerseeds.com Edited to add: Pat Meadows reports that she doesn’t actually recommend that we use Container Seeds anymore, so scratch that, although I do recommend container gardeners look at the site for her recommendations, which are all pretty much there intact.  She suggests (and I agree) Pinetree seeds instead www.superseeds.com which has a container gardening section.

Territorial Seeds has its own winter growing catalog which is enormously valuable both to Pacific NW gardeners in the US also to all cold season gardeners – not everything will work the same way – for example, the Meridia carrot they advertise as for overwintering doesn’t really do as well here.  But there are lots of good things and much that is worth experimenting with.  www.territorialseed.com

Salt Spring Seeds also has a lot of overwintering and suitable cool season seeds – they sell only in Canada, but have an excellent selection.  www.saltspringseeds.com.

 So what are your favorite winter varieties and crops?

 Sharon

Good – because the answer is almost certainly “longer than you think.”  I live in central upstate New York, technically zone 5, but really in practical terms closer to zone 4.  Our low temperature was -28 degrees one year, and our last frost has been as late as June 1 and our first has been as early as August 30 (unusual, our official dates are May 20 and October 7, and in the 8 years I’ve been here, last frost has come as early as April 23rd and as late as June 1, and as early as August 1 and as late as October 31, so there’s a pretty big range) and yet I’ve managed in various years (I can’t do it all every year) to overwinter leeks, spinach, scallions, kale, collards, arugula and of course, the unkillable parsnips absolutely without any protection.

With protection, the range of possible crops expands a considerable amount, with the right choice of varieties.  In a good year, I’m still harvesting things at Chanukah, and I can have more food ready to pick on my unheated porch by March.  With more protection, other solutions, I could go through the winter – we just haven’t made the capital investments yet.  But while not everyone will be able to do everything I can, most of us will be able to extend our season in some measure.

The two major factors are these – light and temperature. I think most of us think that temperature is what matters most, and for most warm season annuals, including many of our favorite annual garden crops, it is.  We’ve all come out to the garden to see almost everything blackened with frost, and known that it was basically all over.  A garden composed heavily of the most popular crops, particularly a garden planted one time in the spring, won’t have a lot to offer in the fall.

That doesn’t mean that warm season crops can’t be part of your fall garden plan – fast growing tender annuals can and should be part of your fall garden – for example, I plant my main crop of pickling cucumbers and bush beans in late June or early July – the plants will mature before frost, just as the first crop is petering out, but more importantly, it means I don’t have spend as much time over a canning kettle in July and August – pushing harvests forwards means that I can can in late September when the heat is welcome.

What you need to know about these crops is that it will generally take a little longer for them to mature if planted after the equinox than before – declining light means that even though the days are long, many of the plants will mature a bit more slowly – so add some time to your growing season.  Usually by mid-September in my zone (later if you are in southern zone, cooler in a northern one), most plants begin to grow very slowly, if at all – they will still mature fruit, but they aren’t setting more blossoms or growing bigger, so if you want, say, to plant 55 day bush beans, you’ll want to get them in 55 days before mid-September.  Some of this involves guess work, and experimentation – it never hurts to take a chance.

Warm season crops that can be planted in my zone as late as early to mid July include zucchini and summer squash, shell beans, bush beans, cucumbers and basil.  If you live in zone 6 or above, you still might be able to do short season winter squash or melons, even.  Remember, even after a frost, you will still be able to keep things for a few more weeks – so, for example, if you plant cucumbers now, and mature a crop in September, you will be eating fresh cucumbers probably until a week or two after your frost – I find that it makes a big difference to extend one’s season by even a couple of weeks into the fall.

The category of crops that will do best for most of us as the weather gets colder, though are mostly greens and roots.  Almost all root crops are much more hardy than crops where we eat the aerial parts, which makes sense, because they are covered with a nice layer of insulating dirt.  Many of them are also hardy in their own right – that is, they can take a lot of cold.  Carrots, parsnips, leeks, turnips, salsify, scorzonera, celeriac, beets, parsley root, kohlrabi – all of these have varying degrees of cold hardiness.  Many of them are cold hardy biennials – you eat the root the first year, usually, but if you leave them in the ground, depending on how cold it gets, they will come back and set seed next year. 

The other category of vegetable that does well in cold weather is many greens – brassicas, lettuces, green herbs and many asian greens.  Many of these, particularly the brassicas, have a wonderful feature where the starches in them convert to sugar after a hard frost or two.  If you’ve ever eaten cabbage or kale or brussels sprouts after a frost, you’ll know the difference is night and day – they are nice enough vegetables during the warm season, but in they are spectacular.  This is true of most roots as well – your beets and carrots will be sweeter after the ground freezes a bit, your turnips will be tastier.  Even your lettuces have a crisp sweet taste.  These crops really come into their own after the other stuff is done with.

Thus, a fall and winter garden will be heavy on greens and roots.  Not all of these are equally cold hardy – beets and carrots, without heavy protection, for example, will simply rot in my climate.  Yes, they can take some frost, but not a winter’s worth.  Parsnips will barely notice winter.  Broccoli kicks out well before cabbage, and brussels sprouts will stand longer still.  Getting to know your veggies will help you get the most out of them.

But back to light and temperature – daylight hours may matter more than cold here – at least if you are speaking of cold hardy vegetables.  The plants start to shut down growth for the winter as the day length gets shorter. That means you’ll want to put your winter crops in your sunniest spot – if you get part shade, save that for summer lettuces or greens, or for kale and collards you will keep going all summer.  Don’t plant you fall garden there, because it may not mature.  And maturity matters – very small plants are a lot less cold hardy than larger, developed ones.  You need to figure out when things stop growing at your light level – this may require you talking to your local cooperative extension, and it will probably involve some experimentation on your part.

What Eliot Coleman found when he began his project (he has the two definitive books on this subject _The Four Season Harvest_ and a new one _The Winter Harvest Handbook_) is that if you choose the right crops and master the timing, light ends up being more important than temperature.  And I think that’s particularly true if you are growing under cover as he is – he loses some light to filtration, and his temperatures, especially in the fall, are more moderate than mine are.  If you are simply trying to extend your season as long as possible in an open garden, you’ll find that temperature is trickier, because a really deep, hard extended cold spell will knock out a lot of crops.  This is, of course, an argument for creating protected growing spaces, but since many of us may not be able to make large capital investments in hoophouses and other projects, it is also an argument for, well, being realistic about what you will accomplish. 

To give a sense of the variation involved, let’s consider two consecutive years of my fall gardens – 2007 and 2008.  2007 was an unusually warm fall – the first hard frost actually came on Halloween, the latest we’ve ever seen it.  The winter was also unusually mild, at least in the first portion of it.  I was able to pick turnips and leeks out of unfrozen ground with only a moderate straw mulch in early January.  Spinach and kale overwintered uncovered for me, and we ate the last of the ripening picked-green tomatoes at Chanukah.

Last year, frost came early, a light one in late September, then a heavier frost in early October.  At the end of October, we had heavy snow and four days in a row in the 20s.  That pretty much ended the run of the broccoli, and other crops I’ve often been able to enjoy well past Thanksgiving.  One of the realities of growing this way is you really don’t know how long a season you will have – on the other hand, the only way to get the best for the longest is to experiment.

We will talk more about growing with cover as we go along, but what you mostly need to know is this – that fall and winter gardening are about experimentation.  You can get advice from me or others who are doing it, you can read Eliot Coleman and get advice from agricultural extension, but most of what you will need to know you will have to learn in some way involves experimentation – if you grew up somewhere where everyone put in a garden once a year, and that was it, you will find that this is far less certain than waiting for the weekend after you last frost date, planting, and then harvesting it all in September.  But that’s not bad – it also means you can eat green stuff for part or all of the year, fresh from your garden – often better, tastier green stuff than some of what’s available to you in the summer.  This is worth some effort.

 Sharon