The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon July 14th, 2009

The hardest part of fall gardening for most people is getting seeds to germinate and plants to tolerate transplanting during summer conditions, so they will be ready when things stop growing in the fall.  This is genuinely a tough project for a lot of us – and tougher for most people than me (given that we have yet to break 80 since May, and most of our nights feel like early September, I’m not sure that I’m going to have to do much, but this is unusual) – hot, dry weather makes it nearly impossible to get a lot of crops into the ground.

 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

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Sharon July 7th, 2009

Here’s what I’ll be doing this week in July here in zone 4/5 – this information will obviously have to be adapted to your zone, location, microclimate and grip on reality , but at least it gives you a sense of things.  And maybe writing it down will make me actually do it all.

 - 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

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Sharon July 7th, 2009

Let’s divide the possibility for what you can grow into the fall and winter up a bit, and then discuss where to buy seeds and plants.

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

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Sharon July 7th, 2009

Every year it happens to some folks – for whatever reason, the garden either doesn’t get in early enough or doesn’t do well.  We get to the beginning of July and we’re left with a panicky sort of feeling that it is too late to do anything about it. Or maybe you are having a good year, and what you mostly want is to keep that going as long as possible – sure, you are preserving and ready to root cellar, but your favorite foods are the ones that come fresh from the garden and you want to know how long you can keep that going.

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

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