Tag: winter growing

Post-winter greens

14 Mar 201611 Mar 2016 by Mike (tfb)

The covers are off and it’s all shades of green! That’s about three months, left to their own devices, living through freezing nights, often around -20°C (-4°F), and a low of -32°C (-25.6°F), under a couple of layers of medium-weight row cover, which means, little light (with the plastic added in, somewhere around 50% of already weak winter sun). Inside, at ground level outside the row cover, the lowest it got on the coldest night was an amazingly not-so-chilly-at-all -13°C (8.6°F). As a simple survival test…excellent!

Wire work

19 Dec 202126 Feb 2016 by Mike (tfb)

Electric fence wire work, snipping 6-foot pieces of 9-gauge wire for hoops to hold up floating row cover in the greenhouse. Hopefully this wire is stiff enough to do the job, supporting up to three layers of row cover, heavy with moisture from humidity and being dripped on by water condensed on the inside of the hoophouse plastic, or weighed down by ice, when the soaked cover freezes at night. This test batch of about 180′ came coiled, in a circle about 2½’ in diameter, and the built in curve is perfect for stretching slightly to span about 4′ of bed. So, no bending required, it’s all about the snipping!

Cold-grown salad

31 Oct 201820 Nov 2013 by Mike (tfb)

Cold-grown: Tiny lettuce leaves, crisp, fresh and delicious…and grown oh so slowly, without cover, in the unheated greenhouse, through many freezing nights, some down to -15C. Still a while till it’s big enough to harvest, and it was seeded way back at the beginning of October: that’s already 50 days compared to the usual spring/summer 25-35 days for baby lettuce mix). Also, the cold effect gets trickier as the leaves get bigger. All in all, though, seeing food grow in the cold with a minimum of help is quite fantastic.