Category Archives: winter vegetables

More winter vegetable varieties

by Julia Frisbie

posted August 5, 2021

Last week we identified the beginning and end of our local persephone season and did some basic calculations to figure out what we can still plant. If you haven’t run out of steam for careful garden work yet, you can now make detailed plans for a winter garden. If you’re like me, and overwhelmed at this point by canning projects and zucchini giveaways, you can rip open all your winter veggie seed packets, mix the seed together, broadcast it, water it, and hope for the best. Even the untidiest garden, bejeweled at dawn with dewdrops, is a splendor:

Here’s a mix of swiss chard, carrots, herbs, and several types of kale that I threw at the ground one year in July. We ate it until we were sick of it in late winter, and then turned the chickens into the patch.

Speaking of root vegetables: Roseann Wuebbels grows Jerusalem artichokes here on Fidalgo Island, and recommends them as a healthy starch that can be overwintered and harvested by simply digging tubers up throughout the cold months. She jokes that they’re her “apocalypse food.” I grow them, too, and agree that they’re a good one to bet on in an apocalypse, because they seem unkillable! Indigenous communities are said to have cultivated Jerusalem artichokes as a type of insurance– an alternative starch in case of maize harvest failures– but I can’t find a reputable (i.e. indigenous) source on this.

Whether you’re planting in rows or scattering seed with the wind, it’s helpful to know what the experts do. I am not an expert yet, so I will refer you to some excellent books that cover winter gardening.

Eating Locally and Seasonally: a community food book for Lopez Island (and all those who want to eat well) by Elizabeth Simpson and Henning Sehmsdorf of Transition Lopez

Folks, it doesn’t get more local than this! The overwintering crops that Simpson and Sehmsdorf recommend planting in the summertime are carrots, turnips, parsnips, rutabagas, beets, kale, chard, salad greens, and hardy herbs.

Backyard Bounty: the complete guide to year-round organic gardening in the Pacific Northwest by Linda Gilkeson

After I checked this book out of our local library three times in a year, I decided I needed my own copy to carry around, break the spine at my favorite page, dog ear, and notate to my heart’s content. Gilkeson recommends planting root crops in July along with endive, radicchio, swiss chard, and kohlrabi. In early August, her dizzying to-do list includes: “Sow last of summer lettuce, radishes, summer cauliflower. Sow winter crops: arugula, fall and winter lettuce, leaf turnip/mizuna, collards, kale, daikon and winter radish, leaf mustards, Komatsuna/mustard spinach, Chinese cabbage and other hardy greens, spinach, sweet onions and scallions, and broccoli raab.” In late August and September, she plants corn salad, cilantro, arugula, and winter lettuce, and in October she plants garlic and broad beans.

The Urban Farmer: growing food for profit on leased and borrowed land by Curtis Stone

Based in Kelowana BC, Curtis Stone’s climate is harsher than ours, but I still appreciate his practical approach. He sells his crops to restaurants, so he never recommends stuff that people won’t readily eat: his overwintered crops are spinach, kale, lettuce, and carrots.

Four-Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman

This book is basically the bible of year-round gardening. It’s the standard by which all other books are measured. There’s no way I can summarize all of the good stuff in here, so I’ll just say: if you’re serious about this, check it out from the library.

The Market Gardener: a successful grower’s handbook for small-scale organic farming by Jean-Martin Fortier 

This farmer is based in Saint-Armand, Quebec, which has much harsher winters than ours but is actually at a lower latitude, so has a slightly shorter persephone season. He’s not shy about using floating row covers, frost blankets, and hoop houses to extend his season. He’s a master at planting things in succession over long periods so he has a constant supply for his CSA customers. The crop rotation plan in the appendix of his book shows that he finishes planting cilantro, dill, lettuce, carrots, beets, snow/snap peas, and beans in August. He finishes transplanting lettuce in September. He finishes direct sowing mesclun mix, arugula, spinach, radishes, turnips, and mustard greens in October, and plants his entire crop of garlic that month. He finishes transplanting seedlings of chinese cabbage, fennel, chicory, kale, parsley, collard greens, swiss chard seedlings until October, too. That’s a lot of activity for October. In our climate, without season extension tools, I’d try to fit everything except the garlic from his October planting list into September.

Fortier also plants an oat/pea mix as green manure in late August and early September. Green manures and living mulches deserve their own post. That’s what I’ll write about next, because it’s time to order seeds if you want to plant them by the end of this month. If you’ve got ideas to share about green manures or living mulches that have worked for you, please leave a comment, and I’ll include it in next week’s article!

When to Plant Which Winter Vegetables

by Julia Frisbie

posted July 29, 2021

If you’ve stashed your seed packets away for the year, you’ve done it too soon. There’s still time to plant lots of winter vegetable varieties here on Fidalgo Island. To be successful, you need to be aware of the way that decreasing daylight slows and stops plant growth over winter.

Elliot Coleman writes in The Winter Harvest Handbook, “As the story goes, the earth goddess Demeter had a daughter, Persephone, who was abducted by Hades to live with him as his wife in the netherworld. Demeter would have nothing to do with this and threatened to shut down all plant growth. Zeus intervened and brokered a deal whereby Persephone would spend only the winter months with her husband, Hades. Demeter, saddened by her daughter’s absence, made the earth barren during that time. On our farm we refer to the period when the days are less than ten hours long as the Persephone months.”

Daylight hours depend on latitude. Coleman notes how, on his farm at 44 degrees north, the Persephone season coincides with two of the holidays of the pagan agricultural calendar of the ancient British Isles, beginning around Samhain (early November), and ending around Imbolc (early February). Most of us don’t celebrate holidays by those names anymore, but we are aware of their modern counterparts: Halloween and Valentine’s Day. We’re at 48 degrees north, so our Persephone season is just slightly longer than Coleman’s, and lines up almost perfectly year-to-year with the modern holidays. Here’s a graph of our 2021 daylight hours from timeanddate.com:

Hours of daylight per 24 hour period are on the Y axis of this graph, so you can see that we have more than 10 hours of daylight per day from mid-February until late October. Those are the times when plants can do enough photosynthesis to put on significant new growth. With less than 10 hours of daylight, I notice that most of my frost-hardy plants are in a sort of suspended animation: they’re not suffering, they’re not shrinking, but they’re not growing much.

Despite having a slightly longer Persephone season, our winter gardens have one major advantage over Eliot Coleman’s: mild temperatures. Surrounded on every side by the approximately 50-degree water of the Salish Sea, our gardens stay warm(ish) and aren’t blanketed in snow for more than a week or two each winter. They may get a touch of frost overnight, but not too much for the sunshine to thaw out by midday. Most of the time, our outdoor winter temperatures are similar to the inside of your fridge.

What that means is, if you grow frost-hardy plants to a harvestable stage before the Persephone season starts and they go into suspended animation, you can treat your garden as a “living refrigerator” all winter long. I am borrowing this term from Mother of a Hubbard, one of my favorite garden bloggers. She has built low tunnels in her garden, and covered them with a frost blanket. I’ve tried that, but no matter how well I secure the fabric, our winter storms always blow it away. Many plants do fine even after the fabric has escaped and wrapped itself around the next door neighbor’s mailbox, so unless you’re a true infrastructure genius, I’m not sure the fabric is worth bothering with.

The seed packets in your collection should note frost hardiness, along with days to maturity. The latter can be used to calculate whether or not there’s still time to plant it before the Persephone season. Note that growth slows down before it stops, so I always try to give fall-maturing plants an extra 30 days in the ground beyond what their seed packet indicates.

Here’s the calculation I use:

DATE GROWING DAYS LEFT THERE’S STILL TIME FOR…
Jul 1 120 days until October 31, minus 30 extra days to compensate for slow growth in the fall, equals  90. I can plant anything that takes less than 90 days until maturity, such as root veggies and overwintering brassicas like kale and sprouting broccoli.
Aug 1 90-30 = 60 Quick brassicas (pac choi, broccolini, etc)
Sep 1 60-30 = 30 Radishes, anything you eat as a baby leaf (spinach, kale, etc)
Oct 1 30-30 = 0

(too late to plant seeds)

 Plant bulbs instead of seeds: garlic, tulips, daffodils, et cetera

Next week I’ll write more about the veggies that feed my family all winter. I’m eager to hear what’s worked for you, too! Leave a comment with your best winter veggie varieties, and I’ll include your recommendation in next week’s post.