Combat this cold with a toasty warm blanket

My zone 5 garden is cold.  From all that I read on the internet, it's not just here.  Gardeners from much of the country are experiencing lots of cold weather and frustration.  Is it like this in late March every year?

Row cover is a way to combat these elements.   

 

Row cover (AKA floating row cover) is a lightweight blanket for your plants.  It’s an easy way to extend your growing season.  It also provides some protection from damaging winds and insects. 

With row cover, you can plant earlier in the spring.  Your seeds will germinate faster and the plants will get off to a better start.  Unfortunately, weeds will also grow much faster.  It’s easy to lose track of the progress that the weeds are making with the row cover to hide their dirty work. 

That being said, I still love this product.  Besides early spring growth, fall plantings grow better, and your vegetables will last longer in the soil.  In the late fall, you can double, triple, or add even more layers to increase the protection. 

The highest quality of row cover I’ve found is called Agribon.  Agribon is made in several different weights.  Agribon 19 offers several degrees of frost protection. I have had 12-15 degrees of protection with this product.  Agribon 19 also allows 85% of light transmission. 

This row cover is water permeable and is strong enough to last several seasons if it is well cared for after it's removal. 

The photo above shows row cover protecting lettuce, the vegetable that can't tolerate as much cold as the other vegetables in this garden.

Row cover is available in many garden supply catalogues.  And I sell it on Ebay.  I have a 25- foot-long section here, and a 50-foot-long section here.

Row cover is one of many ways to get the garden going in cold weather.  For other ideas, click here to visit my season extension page at my website.

Indoor Tomatoes in the Winter

It is very easy to eat something other than grocery store tomato cardboard in the winter months.  You can grow tomatoes indoors! 

Last year I planted a dozen or so of these Red Robin tomato seeds in pots under my grow lights.  They did well.  They produced enough for me to munch on every time I'd walk by the lights, but the rest of the family didn't get any of them.  This year I had room under the lights for 41 plants.  So that's what I planted.

Red Robin grows to be 8 inches to 1 foot tall, and produces handfuls of super sweet 1.25 inch red cherry tomatoes. 

I also grow basil and leaf celery under the lights and I have rosemary and cilantro next to the windows.

The hoophouse

I love the wide open spaces of Eastern Oregon.  I’ve always had a desire to live a more rustic quiet life, and the dream came true when we moved to our 80 acres in 2002.  The biggest down side is that I’m now several hours away from my grandson and the rest of my family.  And another is that this is a zone 5 short season climate.  That’s hard on a passionate gardener. 

One of the ways we found to extend the season is with a hoophouse.   We built this one a few years ago, and have been planting earlier in the spring and harvesting later in the fall ever since. 

We built this hoophouse slightly modifying the techniques described in the book Green Winters by Jack Frazier.   The biggest benefit of this design is that the sides roll up about 3 feet to provide ventilation on hot summer days. 

We lined the hoophouse with solar pool cover.  This forum at Gardenweb.com will convince you of the benefits of this cover.  We acquired this cover from America’s Best Pool Supply. 

We also strategically place large plastic garbage cans full of water to create thermal mass near the plants that are most important to us.  As the temperatures get colder, the plants close to the water hold on much longer than other plants farther away.  

Now we have home grown produce much later into fall.    Yum!

The Fall Garden - A worthwhile venture

A fall garden is a wonderful thing.  I'm surprised it's not more common.  There are several vegetables that can be planted in late August or early September, and you'll be harvesting great crops come mid to late October.  I am growing lettuce, spinach, radishes, turnips, kale, arugula, broccoli, and cauliflower.  We've been eating our own fresh greens from this plot for a few weeks now.

I'll discuss the white row cover in the above photo in a future post.  (It's extremely valuable.)

Peruse the garden catalogues and you'll see many vegetables that take less than 50 days to mature.  All of those are potential fall garden crops.

Of course planting in the late summer requires one to be much more attentive to watering.  New seedbeds should be wet constantly.  And even after the plants are up, it's good to keep the bed drenched for optimal growth. 

Fall is the only time of the year I can get a complete salad out of my own garden.  The tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and carrots are still flourishing from the spring garden.  By the time they're ripe in the summer, the lettuce has usually bolted (turned bitter) from the heat.  Now I have it all!