Vegetable transplants

Winter greens

I'm juggling tomato and pepper seedlings at the same time that I'm harvesting greens.  Yikes. I up-potted all of the tomato seedlings this morning and took them with me for spring break care in the coming week.  They'll have to go inside and outside from the 'mechanical' room at night to daytime temperatures and sun outside, instead of their cosy heating mat and shoplight on a timer.

Hmm.  I'm also worrying about the unseasonably warm weather, as pleasant as it may be.  I may need to dash down from the mountains in the middle of the week to the Piedmont to water.  Hmm.

a collard relative

But the winter greens in my raised beds in the mountains were a welcome sight this afternoon.

Spinach, peas, mustards, and mesclun sown in late February have emerged well, as well as a mystery mustard that I failed to record.  (It's doing very well in the lower raised bed).

purple kale

Arugula, purple kale, and collards are ready to harvest.  It's a good thing we like greens!  And they're good for us, too.

Year-round vegetable gardening

In the Southeastern U.S, we have ample sunshine (over 10 hours a day, except for about a week and half around the winter solstice) for growing vegetables year-round. 

In 'normal' winters, we can grow kale and collards that sail through normal freezes, as well as garlic and onions.

In exceptionally cold winters (like the last couple of years), unprotected hardy greens have suffered significant frost damage.  But even this year, mustards have re-emerged looking pretty leafy in protected walled gardens like the kitchen garden next to the visitor center at the Garden where I work.

I've been delighted with my winter greens experiment in the unheated hoophouse at the Garden --totally amazing.  I'm planning to sow a short season sequence of greens in the pots and bags of soil mix, as well as chard and beets, just to see what happens.

Cold houses and winter vegetables

Coming back from winter break, I've been amazed with the productivity of our winter vegetable gardening experiment in the unheated teaching greenhouse (the Sprouting Wings Greenhouse).

Wow.

Kales, lettuces, and spinach

a flourishing mesclun mix

With no heat, regular poly/hoophouse covering, and plastic water-filled barrels as a heat source, these greens have not only survived, but they've thrived and grown.

Seeds and seed catalogs

I have more than enough vegetable seeds already, I'm sure, both for my own use, and to donate to grow as transplants for Garden Fest, a South Carolina Botanical Garden event in April that encourages folks to grow their own vegetables.

And thanks to Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and Renee's Garden Seeds, with their policies of distributing extra seeds from last year's packaging for non-profit use, I should be set for my outreach activities, both in classes and in our demonstration gardens.

Hmm, so why am I still looking at seed catalogs?  It's fun, of course.  Fortunately, ordering potatoes, leeks, and onion sets helps satisfy the urge to order more seeds....

Next year, I'm going to have low hoops covering some of my vegetable beds (in the mountains and the Piedmont) -- then, even with snowy conditions, I'll be able to harvest kale, collards, and other hardy winter greens.  And, there's an unheated hoophouse at the middle school around the corner in the mountains sponsored by a great program called Winter Green.  The soil has been worked up, but there's currently nothing growing in there.  Hmm. It'll be time to plant soon for early spring harvest.

Winter spinach and a cold greenhouse

I sowed more seeds today (mache and red mustard) in our unheated teaching greenhouse (at the garden where I work).  It's an experiment in growing winter greens for the first time, following Elliot Coleman's inspiration in the Winter Harvest Handbook and Four-Seasons Harvest.

'bags' of spinach and greens:  note the water barrels providing transferred heat

It's quite remarkable. We've had unseasonably cool weather (it was down to 26°F last night) and the surface of the flats and bags was still slightly frozen at 11 am, but the ambient temperature was already 60°F.

Even though fall heat precluded sowing anything in the greenhouse until early November, lettuce, spinach, and arugula seedlings (sown in November) are thriving, and transplants of kale, mustard, and parsley are doing fine, too.

Of course, if I had sown these greens much earlier, they'd be larger and harvest-size, as they are in our outdoor kitchen gardens.  We've been harvesting mustard greens, cabbage, turnips, and broccoli for over a month now.

I'm wondering how my mountain beds of arugula, chard, and parsley are faring under much more severe conditions!

Fall vegetable gardening

I'm doing another three-season vegetable gardening program tomorrow, this time for our Osher Lifelong Learning program.

Amazingly, 24 people are signed up - a remarkable number, it seems to me, and totally encouraging as interest in vegetable gardening!

In my own vegetable garden, my beds are turned, lots of cool-season vegetable seeds are sown, and I've got flats of lettuce mix, greens, and arugula going.

I'm plotting with my fellow garden educator about growing fall greens in an unheated (and unused) hoop house at the garden where I work.  Hmm, that sounds like fun!

We actually have two hoop houses as possibilities (in our after-school greenhouse, my Sprouting Wings colleagues have added water containers painted black, to provide radiant heat, so it may be more congenial than the totally unheated hoop house.)

Winter gardens and gardening

More leaves seems to be the theme for preparation for winter in our garden.

My gardening companion collected more leaves this morning from neighbors near our small house in the mountains (to add to our already thick layer in front and back of the house), then we returned home to the Piedmont to a second load of delivered city leaves. He spent more time this afternoon moving some of those.

Leaves are black gold, certainly, and enrich the soil in our woodland garden areas. Leaves transform clay-rich subsoil to something resembling real topsoil quite quickly. A good thing, although our soil in the Piedmont (covered by lawn for many years) isn't as difficult as what faces gardeners in much of our region.

I spent a bit of time harvesting and freezing lemon grass (we're expecting lower temperatures tonight than we've had so far), and then checked everything else. I've got a lovely flat of mache (corn salad) and I'll try to transplant a few plants into soil tomorrow along with some of the collards. I'll probably put the mache in the cold frame with the top propped up, and see what happens. The lettuces still look great, as do the young collards and mustards. None of my fall spinach germinated, probably because of warm soil temperatures and dry soil, so more spinach will need to wait until late winter.

I cooked fresh arugula as a stir-fry green with homegrown garlic for our dinner vegetable, quite delicious, along with the leftover smoked turkey (from 12 Bones in Asheville, yum) from Thanksgiving.

And, I'm planning to harvest more arugula and cilantro tomorrow - both are still looking great.