Hello everyone! Welcome to my first garden journal post for Spring. This week I prepared garden beds, picked some overwintered greens, and planted seeds. Let’s start with the greens.
It’s technically late winter, but I’d call it early spring, here in Western North Carolina (Zone 7a). The last of the garden is coming out of the ground as we get everything ready for the new year.
Overwintered Harvests
Collard Greens
We planted collard greens last April, ate them in summer, ate them in fall, ate them on New Year’s Day, and left them to die in their garden bed. Surprise! The tall dinosaur-like stalks stayed alive, and little bundles of collard joy grew as the days lengthened . The variety is ‘Morris Heading,’ which is known to make a loose cabbage-like head.
Overwintered Lettuce and More
I planted some mixed-variety lettuce seed on October 18th, this with the intent of eating a little before peak winter and more in Spring. This worked well. The volume is not huge but it’s two tiny little rows using a quarter of a raised 4×4 garden bed, so to have a couple of salads from this feels like a bonus. I also planted a little kale, rutabega (for greens) and spinach in the fall garden around the same time. If you look closely at the photo, you might spot some of each.
What I learned: It’s important, I think, to thin plants going into winter to give them space. When they are so tiny it’s hard to remember that you are asking them grow old in the cold. If I don’t give them room to get big, they can’t and won’t!
How to Learn More About Gardening the Cold Months
I love having the garden out there to think about and eat from in the winter and spring. I rarely get as much of it going as I’d like, and this is for one main reason: I’m pretty tired of the garden by late summer and fall. The weeds, pests, and diseases are at their peak, I’m generally worn out from the long days of summer, and the last thing that comes to mind is planting more seeds to deal with!
But if you’re more ambitious than me, you might ask: where do you learn more about the cold weather vegetable garden? I not gonna tell you how to google, so instead, here are a couple of book recommendations:
Famous farmer Eliot Coleman has written at least three books about year-round gardening that share his pioneering approach (he was one of the first to write extensively about pushing the limits of what’s possible in the cold, dark months). A couple of them are more oriented toward production farming, so for gardeners I’d recommend Four-Season Harvest. Coleman is in Maine, so these tips might need adjustment in warmer places.
For this reason, if you are in the Southeast, Southern Appalachia, or a similar climate, I’d also recommend The Timber Press Guide to Vegetable Gardening in the Southeast by Ira Wallace. Ira is a brilliant seeds-woman with whom I used to play bridge, cook, and pull weeds when we lived together at Acorn Community in Virginia.