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winter garden

Greens that Survive Freezing Weather

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In the first couple of very hard freezes of this fall/winter garden season, I covered my garden with spun row covers to protect the crops from the cold. However, in the most recent freeze, about a week and half back, when temperatures dropped to the low-to-mid-20s three nights in a row, I left the garden uncovered. The plan was to confirm which garden greens were most winter-hardy.

Shallow basket containing three kinds just-harvested greens, set behind a few red radishes with green leaves still attached, all set on a table.
Veggies harvested in advance of the freeze.

The afternoon before the first of those three very cold nights, I harvested a basketful of greens (and some root veggies), in case the whole garden turned into a mushy brown mess. At least I would have those pre-harvested greens to enjoy!

Why does cold-hardiness matter now, in mid-winter?

Seed catalogs are piling up in my house. If you, like me, are contemplating the coming gardening year, having information about cold-hardiness might be helpful as you choose crops for next fall.

Garden plant protection provided by spun row cover over supports that hold the cover away from the plants.
Makeshift supports hold cover over plants.

During a freeze, all of the greens in the garden will look wilted. This is normal. As the temperatures climb back above freezing, the hardiest greens perk back up and look completely unaffected. For gardeners who are short on time or energy in the winter months, keeping a garden full of very hardy greens can be a real benefit.

Some gardeners are happy to provide protection for their less cold-hardy crops and can easily manage the spun row covers and structures to support those covers. Other gardeners may not be able to cover their crops ahead of each freeze, either because they travel or have other time-restrictions, or maybe because of a more limited budget.

Regardless, the more information we have as we plan the next round of crops, the more likely it is that we can make the best choices for our gardens.

My greens crops, after exposure to the hard freeze

After the most recent series of very cold nights, all of my unprotected garden greens are still alive, but some came through better than others. I took pictures, so you can see for yourself which crops did best through the freezing weather.

  • ‘Castelfranco’ radicchio
  • ‘Palla rossa’ radicchio
  • Sugarloaf chicory
  • ‘Full Heart’ escarole
  • Frisée endive
  • Dwarf kale
  • Swiss chard ‘perpetual spinach’
  • Spinach ‘Bloomsdale’
  • Cilantro
  • Curley parsley

Cold damage shows in a couple of ways. Mushy brown areas are the most easy to spot, but thinner, silvered places are also evidence of cold damage.

The frisée, ‘Full Heart’ escarole, and ‘Perpetual spinach’ Swiss chard show the most cold damage of all the greens included here. The heading types — radicchios and the Sugarloaf, show a little cold damage on the outer leaves, but the leaves inside the heads seem to be unaffected.

Some greens show no damage at all. These include the spinach, kale, cilantro, and parsley. The best news is that even the most damaged greens look as though they will survive to resume growing.

If your garden greens look like heck

If the unprotected greens in your garden are the kind that suffered from cold damage in that last round of cold weather, you have a couple of options.

The small green leaves, purple stems, and tightly closed flower buds of chickweed growing in winter.
Chickweed

One option is to trim away the “bad leaves” to reduce the odds of a fungus taking hold and rotting away entire plants. Then, when new leaves grow in the stretches of warmer weather that we get here in the Southeastern US, you will be able to resume harvesting leaves for use in the kitchen.

Another option, that can be put into practice along with the first option, is to bring in some wild greens to supplement your garden greens.

Right now, chickweed and dandelion greens are at their peak in my lawn and garden. If you can identify those with confidence, and you know that the plants are growing in uncontaminated soil (not by a busy road or in a “treated” lawn), they are good wild greens to try, either added to salads, mixed with other cooked greens, or wilted before adding to a pizza.

Getting the Garden Ready for a Hard Freeze

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The first hard freeze in my area is expected to arrive tomorrow evening (Tuesday, Nov. 12). Over the next 24 hours, most gardeners in the path of the cold front will need to harvest the last of the summer vegetables and be ready to cover any crops that might not be ready for temperatures in the low 20s.

The last summer vegetables

View straight down into flat boxes containing red and green tomatoes in a single layer, an inch or two apart from each other.
Last tomatoes for the year.

I have harvested the last of the summer veggies in my garden — all the peppers, even the tiny ones, and the remaining tomatoes.

The tiniest peppers were chopped and sautéed along with some full-sized peppers and are in the crockpot as part of tonight’s chili.

The tomatoes will be used in salads as they ripen, since fresh tomatoes in winter can be hard to come by. Even harvested green and left to ripen slowly in the company of their pinker brethren, these home garden tomatoes will beat the flavor of most supermarket tomatoes.

Large basket containing round orange fruits of the Asian persimmon tree Ichi Ki Kei Jiro.
Small pile of Asian persimmons.

I harvested anise hyssop for my pet rabbits, Moonpie and Charlie Copper, who love that particular herb. It has regrown considerably since the last time I cut off all the dead flowers, so the bunnies have a large-enough supply of leaves to last a few days. Anise hyssop, like basil, will not survive a freeze.

The Ichi Ki kei Jiro persimmons are also ready to come in, mostly, and I brought in a basket-full this afternoon. The tree is providing enough fruits this year that I’ve already shared with one neighbor (Hi, Anthony!) and will be able to share with a few more.

If you have these or other summer vegetables still in the garden, and the cold front is headed your way, consider harvesting them all before the temperatures drop below freezing. Summer vegetables that freeze on the plants will not be good to eat after they thaw.

Crops to protect from a hard freeze

Many of the cool season crops will survive the upcoming freeze in good condition and continue to grow when the weather warms up again. However, to be safe, I will cover the tenderest of the fall crops. These include lettuces, the remaining salad radishes, and the Swiss chard.

I will also cover the escaroles and radicchios, because they are mostly new varieties for me. Their cold-hardiness is unknown.

View from above of closely spaced leafy greens in the garden.
Escaroles will be covered to protect them from extreme cold.

The good news is that I have located covers to place over the more tender crops. These include some actual, horticultural, spun row-cover and an old flannel sheet. Avoid using plastic if you can. If plastic is all you have on hand, make sure it is held above the plants and does not touch them anywhere.

The covers I use can keep the temperature of the garden underneath them a couple or three degrees higher than the outside air. This small increase can be enough to safeguard the crops.

Even the covered greens may look wilted and weird as a result of the cold weather. The key here is not to panic. Wait until warm weather returns before you make rash decisions like pulling up all the plants. Many of the cool-season greens “bounce back” to a more healthy appearance after freezing, then resume growing as the weather warms.

Crops that I won’t protect

Side view of fern-like leaves of carrots as they grow in the garden; in the background, beet leaves, with their red stems, show where the beets are growing.
Carrot patch, with beets in back.

The root vegetables will survive the cold with little trouble, especially since the soil here in north Georgia is still fairly warm.

Another crop to leave in place is the saffron. In my yard, this crop is growing in four different patches in the yard and garden, with each patch sending up its flowers at different times.

I’ve already harvested some of the saffron, but one day when I went out to harvest more, honeybees were visiting the flowers and I decided not to disturb the bees.

Purple flowers, each with six petals, three yellow pistols and red stamens, growing near rocks in a green lawn.
For the spice saffron, harvest the red parts to bring inside and dry before using.
One purple saffron flower in the lawn with two honeybees -- one inside and one on the outside of a petal.
Honeybees visiting a saffron flower, a source of nectar in late October and early November.

Something else to bring inside

Shallow terra cotta planter with densely planted small salad greens -- arugula.

I have already brought the arugula inside. This is one of the salad greens I’ve been growing in a shallow container on the back deck over the last few months. Other greens have included a “basic salad mix” for microgreens and a dense planting of cilantro.

An article about growing these other greens is on the Soil3 blog. I wrote it last summer, for gardeners working in very small gardens and as a way to grow a few more kinds of greens in summer, but the method works as an indoor garden in winter, too. I have a second container of arugula at an earlier stage of growth, that we can harvest from when this first container stops producing greens.

The containers of greens will stay by a south-facing window, and the window will provide enough light for two or three harvests of greens before the plants are worn out.

A Tale of Two Kales

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Actually, I told part of the story in the previous post. My curly kale made it though our drop to Very Cold Temperatures undamaged, but the Red Russian ended up with some bleaching on the older leaves. There is more to know, though, about these two crops.

The purple-stemmed Red Russian, according to my seed catalogs (which I finally have had a chance to look through!), should grow to be fairly large, 18-30 inches in height, but I haven’t seen it get bigger than the lower end of that range so far. However, we may be eating it faster than it can grow! Most of the catalogs seem to indicate that this kale is more cold-hardy than it turned out to be in my North Georgia garden.

The other kale that I grew this year is the Vates dwarf blue curled. If I had realized how truly dwarf it would be, I would have spaced the plants closer together. I’m ordering seeds for a larger curled kale to grow next, because I want bigger leaves.

Both of these kale varieties taste good to me, but they are definitely different. Leaves of the Red Russian are MUCH more tender and taste sweeter to me. The Vates dwarf curled has tougher leaves; for salad, I chop them very small and let them stand in the dressing for a couple of hours before attempting to eat the them.

Even though they are dwarf, the curliness means that there is more actual leaf for their size than for the Red Russian, so it takes fewer leaves to fill my salad bowl. Mixing the two kinds of kale in one salad, though, makes it lovely to behold and even better to eat.

For both, even though many gardeners say that kale tastes the same when grown right through the summer, the catalogs agree that kale tastes better when grown in cold weather. The cold prompts the plant to store more sugars in the leaves as protection against freezing (sugar-water freezes at a lower temperature than plain water).

I talked with a friend today, though, who really doesn’t like kale, even when it is winter-grown. Since she is an outgoing person who hangs out with gardeners and since kale is so very popular right now, she is faced with many-a bowl full of kale, prepared one way or another.

She is a good sport and eats the kale even when she’d rather not, but for other gardeners, the ease of growing such a nutritious, mild-flavored vegetable that stands in the garden through the winter makes it easy to include some in the winter garden. The only question for those gardeners will be which one, or several, to grow.

After the Big Freeze…

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It’s been well over a week since the Big Freeze (when the temperature dropped to around 12 degrees F), but I only just today worked up the nerve to look under the covers in my garden, to check on the broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower. The results of my efforts to protect my crops were mixed.

In the good news category, the unharvested broccoli under the heaviest cover looks amazingly good. I am hoping that growth will continue and I’ll be able to harvest heads that are larger than 2 inches diameter (the size they are now). The cabbages under the thinner cover also look good, but under both weights of covers all the cauliflower — the least hardy of the group — have died. The few remaining broccoli under the thinner cover didn’t completely die, but the flowering heads that I had been hoping to eat were damaged beyond saving.

For the plants left uncovered by anything but hope, outcomes also were mixed. Some outer leaves of the collards and red kale were bleached by the cold, but those bleached leaves are not wilted, and the newer, inner leaves look fine. The curly kale and the carrots appear to be completely undamaged. The spinach looks fine, the parsley and cilantro have some limp-looking leaves among the healthier ones, but all the leaves on all the radishes and beets have turned mushy.

I pulled up the dead plants, but beyond that I haven’t done any real work in the garden today, because we have taken this three-day weekend to rearrange the garage.  All of my physical work has been given over to shifting shelves, boxes, tools, the rabbits and their enclosures, bins of toys and household stuff, and more, to make a working space for Joe to build a boat.

We have been in this house for a long time, and the garage had been full of the accumulated stuff of life in the suburbs while raising two boys, so thinning out and rearranging has been a big job. Finishing the job will take more than one long weekend, really, but while Joe is working out which of his final two choices of boat to build, we are busy making room for the project.

Otherwise, my big task for the weekend has been to order some seed potatoes. Last year I was unable to find any Irish Cobbler potatoes for planting, so this year I made sure to order them early.

Southern Vegetables

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There’s a reason Bob Wills’ song “That’s What I Like About the South” includes turnip greens, black eyed peas, candied yams, buttered beans, and corn bread. The basis for each of those foods grows reliably and well here. The cool-weather vegetable in that list, turnip greens, is almost a fool-proof crop. However, there are plenty of crops that are less reliable producers in Southern gardens.

In years like this one, when my broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbages all are slow to head up, I remind myself that such Northern vegetables can’t be expected to do consistently well in the South. Some years the garden produces big, full heads of all of those by Thanksgiving. This year, the heads on most of those plants aren’t even close to what I consider a good size. If we get a hard freeze any time soon, I probably will be bringing in a lot of ridiculously small vegetables.

Many of the carrots aren’t full sized yet, either, but those will continue to grow slowly underground through all kinds of weather.  It may be March before I pull the last one, but eventually those all will be brought into the kitchen.

Luckily, this year I planted plenty of kale and collard greens and a few bok choy. Greens don’t seem to be delayed the way the heading vegetables are by an early hard freeze that’s followed by weeks of warmer weather.

Even better, we haven’t had a hard enough freeze to turn the winter radishes to mush yet, either, so we still are enjoying those, thinly sliced then salted.

To celebrate the South and its vegetables here on the last day of the year:

Onion-Family is Planted; Cold is on the Way

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On the way home from work one day last week, I stopped at a garden center and picked up a little bag of onion sets — dry, tiny bulbs — and I was able to get about half of them into the ground last weekend.

The bed they were destined for also was planted with garlic, shallots, and multiplier onions. By the time I had all my saved bulbs in the ground, there wasn’t room for all of the little onions in the space that had been set aside. I’m thinking, though, that when I pull out the last of the zombie pepper plants that still are holding onto some darkened, ragged leaves out in the garden, I will be able to plant the remainder of the little white bulbs in the newly emptied space.

An alternative is to plant them around the edges of a bed that will be covered with mulch for the winter, so that spring planting can be done without too much trouble in trying to not disturb their roots. Regardless of which option I choose, planting the rest of those little onions will have to wait for next weekend, which is expected to be quite cold.

All the more tender plants need to be either safely under cover or, if potted, indoors, because it’s supposed to be pretty cold tonight, and a very cold snap is forecast for next week. This weekend we are looking at low temperatures in the mid-20s, but at least one day next week is expected to be down around 22 degrees F. For Georgia, in any month, that’s cold.

I hope all the gardeners out there are keeping warm as they tend to their plants!

What Can I Plant Now?

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Gardeners have been calling the Extension office, from the beginning of January, wanting to know what they can plant NOW. Even when the ground was frozen and the forecast was for a drop down around 10 degrees F, the lengthening days, like a siren song that they couldn’t tune out, made them pick up the phone, call, and ask. Luckily, they ended up speaking with me, another gardener gone deaf to nearly all except the need to begin the new year of planting.

For those who can’t wait, I’ve assembled a couple of timetables. The first one is pulled from UGA’s Vegetable Planting Chart. The dates on the original chart are for “middle Georgia” (somewhere around Macon); I’ve shifted the dates by a couple of weeks to reflect our later warming here in Cobb County.

Crop
UGA planting dates
Asparagus
Feb 1- April 1
Beets
Mar 1 – Apr 15
Broccoli
Mar 1 – Apr 1
Cabbage
Mar 1 – Apr 1
Carrot
Feb 1 – Apr 5
Cauliflower
Mar 15 – Apr 15
Collards
Feb 15 – Apr 1
Kale
Feb 15 – Mar 25
Lettuce
Feb 1 – Mar 15
Onions, green
Jan 15 – Apr 1
Onions, dry bulb
Jan 15 – Apr 1
Peas, garden
Feb 1 – Mar 1
Peas, edible pod
Feb 1 – Mar 1
Potatoes, Irish
Feb 1 – Mar 15
Radish
Feb 1 – Apr 15
Spinach
Feb 1- April 1
Turnip
Feb 1 – Apr 15

The second timetable, though not actually in table form, is from John Jeavons’ book “How to Grow MoreVegetables …”

6-8 weeks before last frost ( Feb 15 – March 1), start in flats:
broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, lettuce, parsley, tomatoes
5 weeks before last frost (Mar 1- 15), start in flats:
carrot, beets
bump up the lettuce seedlings to larger containers
4 weeks before last frost (5-20 March):
sprout/chit potatoes
bump up the parsley
3 weeks before last frost (15-30 March), start in flats:
peas, spinach
bump up seedlings for broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower
2 weeks before last frost (25 Mar – 1 Apr), start in flats:
dill, eggplants, peppers
transplant to garden:
broccoli, Brussels sprouts, peas, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, beets, lettuce, spinach
plant garlic, onions, radishes

A careful reader might notice that the two timetables don’t exactly match. This means that a gardener will need to experiment a little and choose for him or herself the best planting times.

One of the helpful features of the Jeavons’ timetable is that it includes times for bumping up and transplanting seedlings, very useful information for those of us who DIY our garden transplants. One of the hilarious features is the inclusion of carrots as a crop to transplant. I’ve tried it — it’s possible — but the carrots come out all bent and mangled.

Also, I usually bump up my tomatoes – and start my peppers – much earlier than indicated in his timetable. (He bumps up tomatoes – from the flat to pots – on the last frost date, which I count as about April 12-15.)

For my yard, parts of the UGA timetable seem a little early, but my yard is in a hole and stays cooler longer than much of the rest of the county. Other parts of the UGA schedule seem late. For example,  I can’t imagine planting collard greens as late as April 1!

For peas, I use an indicator plant; I plant peas when the trout lilies are blooming in my yard. The leaves of those native wildflowers aren’t even poking up above the soil yet, so this year the peas may get planted a little later than normal. Irish potatoes usually get planted in my yard in mid-March, and my onions and garlic get planted in late October or early November.

Based on both timetables, and all the possible timetables gleaned from other, local gardeners, there is plenty to start working with in terms of spring planting, beginning now. I hope the information is helpful!

 

When the Garden Gets Slammed By a Very Hard Freeze

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I have a friend who says that gamblers should skip going to Vegas and just plant a garden, instead —  letting those weather dice roll and taking odds on what will yield well, what will do poorly, and what will be a total fail.

In the past bunch of winters, broccoli, cabbages, and nearly all the cool-season greens have produced right through until spring. Gardeners in North Georgia are accustomed to the success of those crops, so, back in October, we all would have said the likelihood of those crops surviving the winter was fairly high. This year, the usual winter crops pretty much ended a few weeks ago when the temperature dropped down near 5 degrees F.

It seemed like it might be useful to have a list of the hardiest crops, for future reference when planning the fall/winter garden, so what follows is such a list:

multiplying onions
shallots
garlic
carrots
winter radishes
green onions
cilantro
spinach
Brussels Sprouts (report from another local gardener)

I’m guessing that parsnips would be ok, too, but I didn’t plant any this year.

The perennial herbs also seem to be struggling with the cold. Most years in winter I can find enough fresh oregano down under the browned stems to use for cooking, but today I could find only a few, tiny leaves. The sage has some good leaves, and I found some usable thyme under the tangle of old stems of that plant, but the rosemary looks pretty rough.

Also, since so many of the weeds that I depend upon for bunny food were bitten back by the hard freeze, I’ve been growing wheat greens indoors to feed to my pet bunnies. Without these greens, my bunny-food bill would be much higher!

We’ve been growing sprouts in the kitchen for ourselves, too, to add some fresh, home-grown greens to our meals. With the loss of many of the outdoor crops, we are lucky to have options for continued “gardening” indoors.

If other gardeners can let me know of additional crops that have done well in the cold, we can add them to the list, to help in planning next winter’s garden. Hope you all are keeping warm!

Garden Plans and Events

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After my very eventful December, it has taken some time for the pattern of my days to seem familiar again. I realized this afternoon, though, while hoeing out a few weeds and spreading more mulch in the onion/shallot/garlic bed, that everything feels just about normal. Parts of the garden even LOOK normal, in spite of the drop to 5 degrees Fahrenheit a week or so back.

The onions, garlic, and shallots mostly are vibrantly green, firm and growing. Nearly every other crop above ground has gone to mush  – even the chickweed that I feed to my bunnies! Underground crops, the carrots and winter radishes, seem to have survived the unusual cold pretty well. Only some individual plants that poked up out of the ground were affected.

At the little farm where we volunteer, the winter greens all look very damaged, except for the spinach. That bit of information is probably worth remembering, for future winter gardens.

Tomorrow I’ll be working more in the yard. My compost pile is stacked pretty high with nearly-finished compost that I plan to move onto one of my garden beds, rather than risk letting the nutrients wash out across the back yard. I’d rather have them soaking into my garden! I hope to spend some time planning what to grow where, too.

My last, most favorite seed catalog finally arrived, which means I can place a seed order for my garden whenever I’ve completed the plan. I’ll also be ordering seeds for a Seed Starting class that I’ll be giving in February. Those seeds will all be UGA-recommended varieties, some of which are heirloom. I’m planning to order from a source that sells untreated seeds, so that organic gardeners won’t have to worry about accidentally introducing unknown fungicides or systemic pesticides into their gardens.

The first class I am planning for this year, though, is a Planning for Seed Saving class. It’s scheduled for the 28th at the Extension office, and I’ll have some seeds to share at that class, too, in honor of National Seed Swap Day, which falls each year on the last Saturday in January (this year it’s on the 25th).

I always enjoy meeting more gardeners, so I am really looking forward to both of these classes!

What Gardeners Think About in Winter

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Just to start, two more seed catalogs arrived at my house this week: Vermont Bean and Totally Tomatoes. This means that the planning part of the gardening year is here. I will hazard a guess that I am not the only gardener who already has begun thinking forward to the next round of planting.

This means thinking about which varieties to grow for each vegetable, about how much space to give to each crop, about the best-yet-cheapest ways to add organic matter to the soil, about the crop rotation sequence, about planning for seed saving, about seed starting and whether the fluorescent fixture needs a new bulb. Really, there is just no end to the garden thinking that goes on in winter.

There also, here in the South, are vegetables still in the yard to harvest and eat. In my yard, I have carrots, winter radishes, broccoli, and cabbage that are at a good stage for eating, and there are vegetables that didn’t make it to maturity before the cold set in for me to watch and keep weeded, so they can return to growing as the soil begins to warm again in March. This all takes some thinking, too.

And if, like me, you have a parallel life as a spouse, a parent and a person who has a full-time job, all that thinking has to fit in the spaces between the rest of it. In my own life, the “spaces between” have shrunk down to just cracks for the moment — next week, my youngest son graduates from college, and in three weeks my oldest son is getting married (THREE WEEKS!!!)— but that doesn’t seem to stop my brain from turning toward the garden.