Winter Gardening

We finally put in our Winter garden today. I've been reading "Four Season Harvest" by Eliot Coleman, and what a revelation it's been!!

We've always talked about having a year-round garden. In fact, that was one of our goals when we moved. But I've never been able to figure out how to do it -- until I read this book. As it turns out, quite a few things (salad greens, spinach, and, of course, the brassicas) can be planted in the Fall and consumed during the Winter. As Mr. Coleman explains it, the critical things are crop selection and timing of planting. Unfortunately, due to various circumstances, we haven't been able to get our garden started until today -- about a month after we probably should have put it in. But, according to the book, if we'd planted at the right time, we shouldn't need to do anything special -- not even a cold frame! Mr. Coleman has 30+ years of gardening experience, and says he & his family enjoy fresh produce from their Zone 5 garden in Maine all year.

So if they're planted at the right time, the plants, which should be at the right size for eating by the time it gets cold, go dormant and can be harvested all
Winter. It's usually cold here by Halloween, so the little guys only have about a month to get going. That's probably not quite enough time, so we may end up having to throw a sheet of plastic over the garden to create a temporary greenhouse. That's ok too -- thanks to my brilliant husband, we've set it up so we could do that if we needed to.

I'm not really sure which factor is the biggest in my interest in Winter gardening -- the high expense and low quality of the produce available that time of year, the limited selection available, the wish to work more closely with the land in providing for our sustenance, the urge to be more independent... In any case, it's pretty exciting to think that we might actually be able to enjoy fresh, homegrown food from our garden all year!!