🌨️ Looking back: January '24
A Frozen Garden SURVIVES! Seeding, Pruning, and a few photos.
The Frozen Garden
Our backyard garden isn’t very big. It’s big enough for our urban yard with limited sunlight. Keeping a garden allows us to practice the craft and put a little homegrown food on our plates each season. Having a garden is normal for our kids. They will grow up and always remember having a garden at home. They will remember walking barefoot in the garden and eating fresh picked, tender greens they plucked themsleves. If the garden ceased to exist in our yard, we wouldn’t go hungry. The truth is, for most of the year, we are barely harvesting from it. There are periods where the harvest is ripe, but times like now, in the dead of winter, we only harvest greens once or twice a week and that’s enough for a few meals. So whenever I saw the weather forecast calling for a week of sub freezing temperatures and multiple nights with lows in the single digits, I felt strongly that it would spell the end of our fall/winter salad garden. With that in mind, I wanted to do what I could to try and save it. One, for myself to learn the limits of garden season extension and two, I felt I owed it to the readers and listeners who come around looking for garden encouragement and education.
So this is what I did on Sunday, January 14th:
First, I covered the salad greens, parsley, garlic, and onions with some straw. The idea here was to help insulate the plants and help trap the warmth from the ground. The ambient temperature of the earth at ground level varies depending on where you are, but generally speaking its around 55 degrees fahrenheit. I also figured this straw would provide further space and insulation from any snow/ice accumulation that would occur on top of the frost cloth.
After the straw, I laid down three sheets of frost cloth. I reuse these cloths each year and a couple of them have holes in them. Additionally, two of the three don’t stretch across the whole garden. So some of the ends were only covered with two sheets. The retailer I purchased these cloths from say that one “1.0 oz Medium Weight” frost sheet protects down to 24 degrees and has 70% light transmission. So what happens to the insulation properties when you double/triple the sheets and add some straw underneath? I don’t know except to say it can’t hurt. Right? Also, how much light is getting through when you add the straw and extra sheets? I don’t know. On LinkedIn, I wrote about how I was going to try and save the garden, and Benjamin Fahrer commented to say he thought the plants could last roughly 2-3 days under that much cover. This felt right to me. Only problem with this was the fact that once the sheets got wet and froze, removing them was impossible without destroying them. Additionally, once removed, I would have to put them right back over the garden to protect against the second wave of single digit nights.
And then, the cold weather came. An icy mixture of snow and sleet fell on Monday, January 15th and continued into the day on Tuesday. Temperatures barely got above freezing on Wednesday and then dropped back below freezing for the next few days. The snow and ice that fell formed a thick sheet over everything and hung around for a whole week. This included what fell on the garden. In all, we got into single digits three times during the week and multiple thermometers read 0 degrees F on the night of Tuesday January 16th.
On January 23rd, nine days after covering the garden, the ice and snow had finally melted off the frost cloths and I was able to pull it back. I told Morgan earlier in the day that I was going to assess the carnage in the garden. Last year, after only one night in the single digits, I pulled back the sheets to the rancid smell of rotting plants. So this year, I figured it would be the same.
But it wasn’t! To my surprise, after 9 days of being covered, I pulled the frost cloths back to find the plants underneath still alive. I was shocked.
Here are my take-aways from the experience:
Planting winter hardy plants makes a big difference. This seems obvious, but outside of placing a heated greenhouse on the garden, I don’t think brocolli, cabbage, and kale would have survived under the straw and coverings; primarily because of how far away from the ground (heat) they would be. The salad greens I have in the garden (arugula, kale, mizuna, mustard) are all low growing and winter hardy varieties.
The consistent colder temperatures leading up to the deep freeze helped harden the greens in the garden. Their tissues were toughened and any vulnerable growth was already killed back during the multiple nights in the 20’s leading up to the deep freeze.
The combo of straw, frost cloths, and ice/snow resulted in some solid insulation!
🌱 Seed Starting
We started seeds for our early spring plantings of Kale, Cabbage, Celery, and Lettuce.
I talk all about that, the local ‘Seed Man’, and the difference between feeding the soil and directly feeding plants in the podcast.
✂️ Tree Pruning
In our last newsletter I talked about February being a good time to prune back fruit trees while they are dormant and before spring growth begins. I pruned up our Japanese Maple and took some before and after pictures. Pruning is all about shaping and focusing the trees energy into the areas where you want it going.
One thing to consider is that when you cut a ‘terminal’ bud, or the tip of a branch, it signals the plants to send all of its energy into producing side shoots. If you want bushy growth, this is great. For my Japanese Maple I don’t want bushy growth, so, if possible, I avoid cutting terminal buds. Instead, I cut whole branches off.
Pruning fruit trees is a topic for another time. I need to better educate myself and get more practice before I attempt to pass along any information here.
January ‘24 Photo Roll
BTW do y’all have any favorite children’s books on gardening?
We covered our broccoli (planted a month or two late and just started to produce some nice heads) with poppy straw from our chickens and all but the largest survived!! Possibly because I wanted to taste the home grown broccoli before it went bad so in the snow I broke off and ate the top head 😬. But now our chickens have thought that garden is the best place to scratch, and I saw a caterpillar so it remains yet to be seen if it’ll survive to produce anything.