Probably more for northern states than Fla; you have different problems.
Home & Garden: Extending the Gardening Season
11/25/2009 11:00:00 AM
by Georgeanne Davis
I love Edith Piaf's "Non, Je ne regrette rien," and hope some year I'll be singing that tune as I look at the garden season just past. But not this year. With very heavy frost now setting in most mornings, I have good reason to regret not putting more fall garden plots in under cover.
I used to feel that by Thanksgiving the garden could be put to bed and forgotten for a few months. But in my neighborhood hoop tunnels have been springing up like mushrooms, and I've been eyeing them with envy, thinking of the radicchio and kale, beets and mesclun that might dwell beneath their covers. In my own garden, the winter greens are nearly gone and mesclun growth is slowing as the plants shiver under their too-light blanket of row cover. True, it's almost Thanksgiving and I'm still, with only a bit of effort expended to extend the season, eating homegrown salads, but with some extra effort, I could be the Eliot Coleman of the St. George peninsula.
There are more reasons than ever to make that effort. The later into the fall that I eat my own greens, the more I dread relying on salad greens shipped in bags from California that seem more tasteless with every passing winter, and the price grows increasingly prohibitive. As energy investment banker Matthew Simmons said in his recent keynote address at the Island Institute's Sustainable Island Living Conference, "We should end global food and rely on local food. In my opinion, it is the energy content that will end global food." Elaborating, Simmons said that the cost to obtain increasingly scarce fuel in the future will preclude international or transnational transport of food via truck.
Hoop tunnels serve functions other than cold protection: at planting time the lightest coverings can shade seedlings from the sun, and they also protect mature plants from deer predation in fall, or at least that's been my experience - even with row cover set directly on greens, the deer seem to leave them alone.
There are changes I need to make to have a better fall garden. Not going overboard on strictly summer plantings is one of them. I plant way too many tomatoes, and leave them in until frost, tying up beds that could be better used for fall chards, kales, carrots, beets, winter greens like escaroles and endives, spinach, leeks, braising greens and cole crops. When the blight hit my tomatoes this year, I suddenly realized how much space they used up in the garden and decided to firmly limit myself to no more than a dozen plants next year. Bottom line: the cool fog of the peninsula makes it hard to get a good tomato crop, so why not take the path of least resistance and plant cool-weather crops instead?
Anyone planning on extending their gardening season can learn a lot from Eliot Coleman's newest offering, The Winter Harvest Handbook (Chelsea Green), the follow-up to Four-Season Harvest. But for purely technical advice on making a hoop tunnel, there are well-illustrated instructions available at the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation's web site, www.noble.org/Ag/Horticulture/Rai-sedBedGardening/mini_tunnel2.html. These instructions address the problem of securing the covers well yet making it possible to easily open them to get at the beds.
I see this as a possible scenario/timeline: plant fall crops in late July, when early lettuce and peas come out, and in August and early September when beans and other crops finish up, and loosely cover the new rows with lightweight row cover to shade them and keep moisture in and encourage germination. Place fasteners on the sides of the beds that will eventually hold the hoops. Put hoops with their plastic covers in place by late September. The row cover can still be left on the plants for extra protection or a layer of even heavier row cover placed on top of the lighter weight material. The recommended winter covering for the hoop tunnels is UV-resistant, high-quality plastic specifically designed for greenhouses and low tunnels. Construction-grade plastic can be used, but it degrades quickly in sunlight and if it breaks up, pieces it can be blown all over the neighborhood.
Extending the season means extra juggling of materials and managing of crops and plantings, but I think that once there's a rhythm established and the tasks are spread
out over the season, it will become easier and the satisfaction of having late-season salads and greens makes it all worthwhile.
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