“Oh, you’re a gardener, so what do you do in the winter? You don’t grow food right?”
I love this question because there are so many cool things gardeners do in the cold months.
November means cooking up yummy dishes from soups to pies from autumn’s harvest. The more you store in your root cellar, garage, basement and fridge from the year’s bounty, the more bang for the buck you get from your garden. If you get into fermenting and canning, your benefits go up even more.
If you planted a mid-summer crop of potatoes, December is a great time to harvest them. How cool is it to have friends over for dinner for the holidays and servethem fresh potatoes you harvest last week! So cool.
December also brings opportunity to share your bounty. You can gift those you love with home grown and dried herbs or fruits. One year we gave everyone popcorn we grew. Another year, it was kimchee we made from fall grown cabbage.
December also brings the first of the seed catalogs and these are one of the best things to read while sipping a cup of hot tea/coffee/coco on a cold wintry day in January and February. This is the time to dream about what you will grow next year .. oh, but wait .. we also do our seed inventory and reflect on what worked and what didn’t during the year with things like:
- Did we use up seed of our favorite tomato variety?
- Did anything new we tried do great or horrid, or just so-so?
- Was there a whole crop fail? This is the time we chat with each other to see if everyone in our community had a bad year with that, or if we need advice on what might have happened in our garden.
Reading seed catalogs lets us dream of warmer days in spring and plan what we want to do next year in the garden. They also provide useful information and are great resources.
A creative winter garden project is designing the next phase of our garden. Whether it be the next phase of our long range garden plan (this is the year I put in blueberries and asparagus!) or so a new garden follow-on layout from spring and summer. Maybe you expand it into fall and winter if you have not yet ventured into four season gardening.
Likely the most rewarding is the continued harvest. My favorite winter harvest story is from a few years ago during a winter storm dubbed ‘snowmageddon’. It was the biggest snowfall I’d ever been in. We dug a path to the collards, buried deep in the snow to harvest some for dinner, and honestly they were the sweetest collards I’ve ever eaten.
Harvesting in winter can be less dramatic, simply have a few things in a simple hoop house or cold frame that could be harvestable in winter and certainly when they get a warm day or two to grow a bit and provide more food offerings.
Winter is also the time to start early spring and some summer crops. Your brassicas can be started indoors to be hardened off and planted our as soon as the ground softens up. Some summer crops like basil and peppers that take a long time to germinate and get growing also benefit from being started in late winter.
I’m also in mid-swing with teaching The Foundations of Organic Gardening Course, which empowers people to be successful gardeners.
Winter is a great time study, dream, muse, plan, order seeds, start seedlings and chat with other gardeners.
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