Food & Frosts
Alabama Blue Collards - Pick plant varieties for your winter garden that can take a little frost.
The weather report says a low of 28 tonight. At E.A.T. South we grow vegetables all year round, and, honestly, winter is our favorite season. How do you grow food when it’s cold? Here are three ways we manage the cold in a winter vegetable garden.
1-Grow cold hardy vegetables - A cold hardy plant can survive cold temperatures. Russian kale (we grow red and white Russians) is hardy to 10 degrees F. An Alabama frost doesn’t bother it. Right now we are growing collards, kale, mustard, leeks, spring onions, lettuce, garlic, broccoli, chard, beets, carrots, radishes and kohlrabi. In Alabama, we can have plenty to eat in the winter!
2-Use floating row cover - Floating row cover is a fabric made to use on farms. It comes in different weights/thicknesses. You can use the lightest fabric to keep insects off of your plants. The heavier fabrics help protect against frost. You can buy row cover in different lengths and widths online.
Floating row cover is like a little blanket for your garden beds. Available in different lengths and widths, you can “float” it over your vegetables or attach it to PVC or aluminum hoops.
3-Plant in warmer microclimates - For gardeners, a microclimate is a space in your yard or on your land that has a different temperature or weather pattern than most of your yard. For example, if you have a brick wall or fence, the area next to it will be warmer, especially on the south side. During the day, the sun warms the brick, and at night, the brick radiates heat. (Same thing happens with pavement.) Planting next to this wall will give you a few more degrees of heat on a cold night, and sometimes that’s all you need to keep plants from freezing. One of my neighbors grew tomatoes into January because they were next to a brick wall!
Also notice where you have frost pockets, colder spots or spots that have more or earlier frost or get cold winds. Don’t plant a winter garden there. Plant in a warmer microclimate.
Microclimate example - In the top picture, the plants with the brown, wilty leaves are nasturtiums. The white-brown spots on the leaves are frost damage. The bottom picture the same planter, but this nasturium is growing in a warmer microclimate. Heat from the concrete, maybe heat from the gravel along with protection from the cold, dry wind means this little plant is fine when the ones two feet above it have frost damage.
You don’t have to try to do all of these things to grow food in the winter. Just picking cold hardy varieties is likely to be enough. Do you grow vegetables in the winter? How do you keep your winter garden growing?