January Garden

I’m not so sure how I feel about this year-round gardening thing. Sure, it’s great to pull some fresh veggies out of your backyard in the middle of winter, but I kind of miss the winter break. Not that I’ve been working too hard out there!

So, to recap, for the first time I tried a fall “garden.” In August I planted broccoli, a few brussels sprouts seedlings, and tried to start some onions from seed. In theory, the brassicas enjoy the cooling weather of fall, giving harvests between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The onions sprout and, like the garlic, winter over for a summertime harvest.

As you’ve probably guessed, it didn’t work that way.

The brussels sprouts hunkered down and did nothing. One of them disappeared without a trace by September. Three attempts at seeding onions resulted in a half-dozen feeble seedlings which all got buried under the great Poop Drop in November (they were too small to work around). The broccoli did slightly better, but they were not about to adhere to my mental time schedule.

It wasn’t until the beginning of November that the broccoli started acting like broccoli.

 

Barely. I have been deeply grateful that I have real row cover material this year (thanks Mom & Dad), so I was able to leave it over the plants without worrying about them overheating, or being blocked from sunlight and rainfall. When we had a week or so of nights above freezing, I could easily enough uncover them for a little sunbathing.

The flower pot is to protect the cover from the pointy-ish end of the support stick. I took this picture the first week of January, so you can see it took nearly two months for this crop to get anywhere near harvest size. Or five months from planting, which was probably another month or two after seeding.

These are some well-aged broccoli.

There was a little bonus under there, too. Over summer I let some of my springtime lettuce go to seed, and these guys came up close enough to the broccoli to include them under the cover. So I had a little fresh January greenery on my sandwiches for a week or so.

Another week after these photos we were hit by a serious deep freeze, with temperatures in the single digits and wind chills around zero. (Yes, it does get cold in North Carolina, just not for long.) So I harvested everything I could…four decent-sized heads.

They’re smaller than the ones the farmers grow, but they are beautifully compact with a lovely dark color. I assume that means more vitamins.

I immediately blanched and froze them, filling a quart bag and a little bit more. I was surprised to find this hitchhiker during the process.

I then checked all the other heads and didn’t find a single other worm! That’s amazing, and a big benefit to “fall” gardening.

I wasn’t sure if broccoli could survive a deep freeze under cover (I actually have two layers over most of it), so as an experiment I left behind the smallest main head, along with the decapitated plants. If they do survive, I should get a fair number of secondary heads, bumping up my harvest a bit. At the moment, the results are surprisingly indefinite. Some of the plants look completely dead, others have some dead leaves and some healthy ones, and most of the small heads are looking ok for now. I think the one main head I left is a loss. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about “fall” gardening, it’s that things happen at a much slower pace than in spring and summer, so I’ll let this experiment play to its end.

A week after my pre-freeze harvest, it was time to do this.

Yup, I just started seeds for spring! And while the old generation gives its last gasp outside, the next one is just getting started inside.

To quote my favorite author, “So it goes.”