July 29 Column: Grow a Winter Garden

Even though I garden in zone 5, I have learned how to garden through the winter months — without the use of supplemental heat! Yes, this really is possible. You can learn how I do this in today’s garden column about growing a winter garden. Here’s a link to it in The Spokesman-Review: Choose the right crops and covers for year-round gardening.

In both my column and video, I mention some crops that you might not have heard of before. I learned about them while reading Eliot Coleman’s excellent book, The Winter Harvest Handbook. I was impressed by his comments about trying new things and how these unusual salad greens add so much taste and texture to their meals. It is my hope that you will try new greens, too… in addition to some you’ve grown in the past.

For example, the plants in photo above are corn salad (mache).They are delicious and seem indestructible, no matter how cold the temperatures get.

 Another great crop that I grow every year is ‘Vates’ kale. I had read that it performed exceptionally in field trials of cold-tolerant vegetables so it has been my go-to variety for our winter garden.

If you aren’t crazy about kale, I found a recipe for it that is wonderful. You remove the center stems, lightly chop up the leaves and parboil them for 5 minutes (that just means boiling them in water, in case you aren’t familiar with that term). Then you scoop them out, drain them and set them aside. In the meantime, saute some garlic in a skillet, then add the kale to it. Drizzle some sesame oil over it and oh my, that is tasty!

If you’d like to see what my first winter garden set-up was, that’s in the photo to the left. It involved hoops, floating row cover and eventually a sheet of plastic on top when the temperatures really started to drop.

Of course, now we use our hoop house, which has worked really well for us. You can learn more about it in this blog post, which includes the materials we used and even a video on the construction of it.

Here is this week’s “Everyone Can Grow A Garden” video: