There’s Still Time to Plant Seeds for a Winter Vegetable Harvest!
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If your part of the world is anything like Vermont, it’s been hot as the dickens the last couple of weeks, and sunny to boot. Sometimes I feel like I live on the desert planet Tatooine (you know—because of the binary star system). Too late to start planting? Nope. You can still get yourself an honest-to-goodness, legitimate farmer’s tan—by planting your seeds for a bountiful winter harvest.
From the Providence Journal:
There is still time to plant seeds to provide fresh vegetables well into winter.
Eliot Coleman, author of Four-Season Harvest and The Winter Harvest Handbook, grows vegetables through the winter in Maine.
It’s much easier in Southern New England.
There are several varieties of radishes that grow so quickly that they will be ready to pick before winter arrives, says Eva Littlefield, a customer service representative for Johnny’s Selected Seeds, an employee-owned company in Winslow, Maine.
Hakurei, a white turnip that Johnny’s carries, grows quickly and tastes delicious raw, when it is about as large as a golf ball, or cooked, when it is about the size of a tennis ball. When it grows larger, voles or some other critters tend to nibble on it beneath the soil’s surface. It matures in 38 days.
Radishes mature quickly, too. A beautiful example is Amethyst, ready in 30 days. Cherriette, a small radish, matures in 26 days.
Carrots mature in about nine weeks. Plant a variety such as Sugarsnax — the name says it all — before the end of August, and they will be ready to pull before the end of October. In his first book, Four-Season Harvest, Coleman says the variety Napoli will endure winter.
Some varieties of kale and salad greens will make it through the winter. Winterbor, Starbor, and Ripbor are especially hardy varieties of kale, says Eva Littlefield. With absolutely no protection from the cold and snow a patch of kale — planted last September — made it through last winter, and it could be harvested through the snow. It is a hybrid that has been growing in the garden for four years, and every summer, we save the seed it produces.
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August 19th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Another tidbit to add is that Eliot Coleman’s rule of thumb is that plants stop growing/maturing when the length of daylight falls below 10 hours. So for crops that are winter hardy, you want them to have reached harvest readiness at the time that days get that short. They will stay healthy and in a kind of stasis after that point — still the same readiness for harvest but no additional growth or maturation. (Assuming they are hardy to your weather and/or you are providing them with the right level of protection.) So, for example, if your day length falls to 10 hours on November 1st (about the case for 45′ North latitude, which is roughly the border between Vermont and Canada and between Wyoming and Montana, to give you a sense), then you want your winter veggies to have matured on that date. To know when to plant them, just work backwards for the time they need to grow — though I’m sure you have to make some adjustment to account for the fact that at that time of year things are growing more slowly than at the peak of the season.
This site (http://www.orchidculture.com/COD/daylength.html) gives you the length of day on the 1st and 16th of each month at each 5′ latitude between 60′ south and 60′ north.
September 7th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
[…] There’s Still Time to Plant Seeds for a Winter Vegetable Harvest! […]
September 8th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
For those of us living in the southwest, we should have even more time to get some winter crop into the ground, and should be able to harvest it late into “winter” — since our winter, at least in San Diego, is hardly much of a winter at all.