Garden Wisdom Blog — category: Winter Gardening

Growing food outdoors over winter is easy if you equip yourself with the right gear. Outdoors, we use cloche protection, row cover, and mulches to insulate the soil and keep frost off plants. And we choose the hardiest varieties of plants that can deal with the low light levels, short days, and cold growing conditions. Growing food indoors can be a challenge, the main challenge in growing food plants (at any time of year) is supplying adequate light. If you can achieve this, the range of plants you can grow is really up to your imagination – and determination. Indoor...

It’s September, and much of the garden has been put to bed. Heat loving summer crops have all but withered: Sunflower heads have been cut for drying, tomatoes have been picked green and brought indoors, and pumpkins sit bright and orange while the rest of the plants have succumbed to mildew and the season’s end. Now is the time to plant legumes as cover crops, though. Members of the pea and bean family germinate well in the cooler soil of autumn. Plants like clover, fava beans, vetch, and winter field peas are perfectly cold hardy, and will continue growing (slowly),...

All gardeners need to understand how to work with first and last average frost dates. Keeping these dates in mind provides a very good idea of how early to plant different kinds of seeds, and how long to expect a growing season to last. All vegetables take a certain amount of time to mature before they are ready to harvest, so it’s crucial to provide that time. You don’t want to sow tomato seeds in July, because they take several days (or weeks) to germinate, and the plants will not be mature enough to begin flowering for at least a...

The first average frost date for Lower Mainland BC is November 2. This date is reflected pretty closely from the Sunshine Coast and Gulf Islands, coastal Vancouver Island, Puget Sound, and down to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. That means we have approximately eleven weeks of growing time before we can reasonably expect the cold to impact unprotected crops. With even minimal crop protection, we can extend the season even further, but this time of year is critical for planting fall and winter harvest vegetables, and for getting some cover crops started to improve the soil over winter. Here’s my...

With careful planning, seeds can be sown from winter to autumn in order to keep the garden productive pretty much all year round. Here are some tips for seed sowing for the longest harvest window. Determined growers sometimes think of the garden as a member of the family, deserving care and attention regardless of the season. Because seeds take time to mature into edible crops, this is a kind of meditation in forward thinking. The year round gardener must always be planning six months ahead. Succession Sowing Starting out, many gardeners think of seed sowing as a single event that...