Experimenting with a Winter Harvest of Lettuce and Spinach

I have wanted to write this post for months because I am quite excited about the thought of growing a garden year-round.  Never mind the fact that I am not entirely successful with one season, I want to grow in all 4 seasons. 🙂

This past winter I decided to experiment with an idea I had read about in Eliot Coleman’s book The Winter Harvest Handbook:  Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses.

Eliot Colman lives in Maine and has produced organic crops commercially for several years. I haven’t read the book from cover to cover but what I did gather was that you can harvest cold-weather vegetables in the middle of winter with an unheated greenhouse. (I really did read more than the cover. :)) This year I finally decided to try it although I did not start in the fall as they suggest but at the end of November when things were starting to get fairly cold.

All I had at that time was row cover and a very thin piece of plastic.  As a matter of fact, I did not have enough of the thin plastic so I used a feed bag for part of it and you know how much light a feed back lets through. Zilch.  But those little seeds are hardy and they came up anyway.  I did take the feed bag off during the day if it wasn’t overly cold. After I planted my seeds of lettuce, spinach & cilantro, they started to germinate (I think it may have taken longer than the norm.) but then we were hit with extremely cold weather.  At least for Arizona.  There were times the nighttime temperature dropped between 7°-10°F.

And my little seedlings lived – using just the row cover & thin plastic!  I was quite surprised and pleased as you can imagine.

In The Winter Harvest Handbook,  they talk about hoop houses and other enclosures that they grow their lettuce in but I have cages over my garden area and that’s what we used.  It worked very well.  I purchased the thickest plastic I could find at Home Depot – I can’t remember the thickness at the moment but it was the thickest they had and felt pretty sturdy.

At Christmas time Russell and my dad made a framework for which we could attach the plastic to.

This is how my little garden looked at the beginning of January about a month after I placed the seeds into the ground.

There’s that feedsack I talked about earlier.

The seedlings had not done much since I planted them in November, as you can attest to.

(the beginnings of lettuce)

(Spinach)

Like I wrote above, the book does say to plant in the Fall, so I wonder if this would mean you would need to plant a very large area so that you could harvest all winter long because things were certainly growing slowly.

But…

when the weather started to heat up around the end of February my little winter garden started to take off.

This is what it looked like in mid-March.

and here it is now… just a few weeks later. We’ve had several salads from this. I mix the lettuce and spinach together.

I still keep it under row cover just to keep in moisture and to try and keep the lettuce from getting dirt on it when watering.

The lettuce

spinach

I’ve never grown cilantro so I don’t know if this is how it normally looks or not.  I was thinking I would get more of a bunch than this.

I’ve been so happy because I haven’t had any issues with bugs. That’s a very big reason why I have not wanted to grow lettuce, so this makes me happy.

I guess that I need to read more of the book to find out more of the how and why of things but I’m happy anyways that I have something growing.  Also, this might be a good case in point of why you wouldn’t need to start lettuce and spinach seedlings indoors to transplant later because you can direct sow as long as you have row cover and plastic.

Any tips or advice for this newbie?  Have you ever tried to grow something through the winter?

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