July is the perfect time to start getting your fall/winter garden crops in the ground for the gardeners that get frosts from September onwards. Our first fall frost has been as early as Sept 3rd and as ‘late’ as mid October. Like any gardening it can be a little bit of a gamble, but you’d be amazed and how many plants bounce back from a light frost and with further protection of cold frames, mini-hoop/low tunnels, frost fabric you can be eating greens until the holidays or even during the whole winter.
Some of our Seeds for our 2014 Fall/Winter Garden ( not pictured are root veggies like carrots, parsnips plus many brassicas)
Fall/Winter gardening takes careful planning and I’m still working on the right sowing and transplanting dates for my region. My greatest advice for new fall/winter gardeners is to read through some great resources which I’ve listed in this post, many which are FREE and full of wonderful information.
I follow the sowing dates of Niki Jabbour’s book ‘The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener: How to Grow Your Own Food 365 Days a Year No Matter Where You Live’ and the West Coast seeds FREE planting guide.
I LOVE the West Coast Seeds FREE planting charts! In fact for my first year gardening I relied entirely on their seed catalogue to learn how to grow our vegetables & have bought seeds from them for 6 years. The fall/winter planting chart is excellent, you can view it online by clicking the picture below. They also have other planting charts for any other location in Canada, the growing zones of which are similar to many in the US and elsewhere.
A couple of other favourite reads for winter and four season gardening are by Eliot Coleman, who lead the way for winter gardeners globally with his two books:
I wrote a post on cool versus cold hardy vegetables below. It has details and lots of pictures of our fall/winter gardening and veggies pre and post frosts:
If you’re new to building low tunnels, Mother of a Hubbard offers an excellent post on building your own low tunnels. She is also a master winter gardener (her garden even survived the polar vortex last year!!) and I highly recommend her blog to anyone interested in fall and winter gardening.
A couple of Mother of a Hubbard’s inspiring low tunnels
I’ve been using mini-hoop tunnels and heavy weight row cover for the past couple of years which you can read all about in my ‘Using Season Extenders’ post.
Our Fall/Winter Garden Plans for the 2014 Year:
This is an exciting year for our fall/winter garden. I’m growing many more greens than last year as we ran out too early. Some plants needed to be in the ground earlier too (like our fall broccoli which didn’t have enough time to head). This year we have a 20′x7′ polytunnel greenhouse too which we’re experimenting with overwintering large beds of green onions, spinach, winter hardy lettuce and mache. Our carrots were sown into the polytunnel 2 & 4 weeks ago, we’ve got one bed of parsnips and rutabagas that were sown in June then another just a couple of weeks ago. Beets and turnips have been sown this past week. Most of our mustard greens get sown in Sept, along with mache and arugula but the lettuce goes in mid-August. Last year I planted our mustards, arugula and asian greens too early and all bolted in the September heat wave. Timing for them is tricky but I’ve decided to do multiple sowings to make sure some work out. We have 30 broccoli transplants and some fall cabbages which go in the ground in a couple of weeks once the summer cabbages and garlic get pulled up. I transplanted 40+ leeks a week ago, which might be not be enough time to get large ones, but we’ll see. Winter gardening continues to be a learning curve for me, but at the cost of food these days I’m finding it important to push the growing season every year. Stay tuned for full winter gardening blog posts as I keep everyone updated on how our fall/winter garden is going!
Have you done any winter gardening before?