Winter Gardens

Easy, practical, delicious – growing an organic food garden
is a skill anyone can learn: that’s my main message! It doesn’t have to involve
a lot of work and certainly doesn’t require a big investment in special
products or equipment.

The coastal Pacific Northwest
is a wonderful place to garden because so many vegetables can be harvested
fresh out of the garden all winter. You can grow a surprising amount in a small
area because it produces food all year. Go out to my garden in January and you
will find it full of carrots, beets, leeks, celeriac, lettuce, spinach, parsley
and other leafy greens, as well as cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kale and much
else besides. With a planting season that lasts six months and a harvest season
all 12 months of the year, our plants and planting schedules are unique to the
region.

The key to this bounty is getting the timing right. That
means starting seeds while there is still enough time left in the growing
season for plants to mature by late fall. I like to think of the winter garden
as a ‘living refrigerator’ –things
don’t grow in the short, cold days, but everything is still alive. Be sure to
look for frost hardy, winter adapted varieties. For some crops, such as
carrots, beets and Swiss chard, I haven’t found noticeable differences in
hardiness, but for lettuce, broccoli, leeks, cabbage and others it is essential
to choose winter-hardy varieties.

There is also a spring dividend as wintered-over plants
continue to yield well through the spring. This means there is no period
without a harvest as there is with a spring-planted garden. Once you establish
a year-round garden schedule, you won’t need to work so hard to get an early
start. You can relax and sow later in the spring when the soil is warm because
there will be plenty to harvest from the garden from March through May. Overwintered
greens grow a new crop of leaves in the spring, root crops stay in good
condition outdoors until the end of March (leeks are fine until May), purple
sprouting broccoli and winter cauliflower produce heads from February through
May.