Year Round Gardening Mini Class

 These are the notes taken from the Year Round Gardening Mini Course

Introduction:  The objective is to grow 365 days of the year.

Year Round gardening is focused on Fall and Winter Gardening.  However, to achieve that, the gardener must begin seeding in late August.  And in order to be able to do That, they need to have preparations ready in June and July.

• Crop selection, sourcing seeds
• Seed starting materials
• Location preparation
•  

  If you live in zone 8, 9.  Winter gardening is probably not particularly difficult.

Yes, you will need hoop houses, some winter protection. But not extreme measures.

Key Principles

1.  Crop selection.  Over 30 different crops that you can grow over the winter.  But. 7 crops that are considered the base crops.

2.  Timing.  When are you getting these crops started and how will you manage them. 

3.  Protection.  How do you cover the crops and protect them from cold temperatures, wind, precipitation. We're focusing in low input interventions.  We're not talking about adding heat, light and high intensity measures.

Part 1.  Crop Selection

Base Winter Crops

• Lettuce
• Spinach
• Carrots
• Swiss Chard
• Mache
• Bok Choi
• Kale

 

Lettuce  This is the least cold hardy of the winter crops.  Usually lasts until temps get down to 25 F.  Probably the one you want to eat earliest 

Spinach  The "workhorse" of the winter greens.  You can get as much as 8 months of harvest from one planting.  Start spinach about the 1st week of August.  Start harvesting in Mid October.  Some  years, you can harvest through until early May.

Swiss Chard.  Can be eaten young in salads, or as a cooked green.  

Bok choi and Asian Greens.  Not quite as hardy as Spinach.  Except for TatSoi.  The smaller leaves are as hardy as spinach.

Carrots:  Carrots benefit from cold temperatures, making them more sweet.  These are very hardy. and will last in the ground for the entire winter

Complete list of Winter Hardy Crops:

Part 2.  Timing

The key with winter growth is often not the temperature, but the day length.  Even if the hoop houses or cold frames keep the temperatures above freezing, plants often restrict their activity once the daylength reduces down beyond a certain threshold.  While they continue to live, they typically don't add any new growth during this time. 

This means that we need to have these fall and winter crops developed and "grown out" to the point where they can simply persist through the winter without relying on them to add much volume.  They have to be large enough to harvest, before those 10 hour days arrive.

The are about three months when day length decreases below the 10-hour threshold.  Typically from mid November through the end of February.  Starting again in March, day length increases to the point where plants can begin to be productive.

As Fall progresses, temps get progressively cooler, day length gets progressively shorter and plant productivity decreases.  Therefore, you want to sow early in the fall to make sure you have enough productive hours to establish your winter vegetables. Typically, you need to add 15 days to the expected time to maturity found on the seed packet, due to this decline in productivity.

As a general rule, begin planting about 2 months before the first frost date in the Fall.  So if your first frost date is October 1st, then you must begin planting two months earlier, about August 1.  And you have about a two-week window to get all your seeds started.   

Similarly, if the first frost date is November 15, then you should begin seeding on September 15.

August and September can be very productive months for the Summer garden, and there might be little space outside, so consider planting those seeds indoors.  This will also be beneficial for those plants that don't germinate well during the high temps of mid summer.  It may be cooler and moister environment indoors instead of the baking heat of mid August.  then you can transplant outside in October when other crops have finished.