First Lessons Of Winter Gardening

One of the things that I've already learned about winter gardening is that things grow much more slowly in cooler weather. Of course I knew that, but failed to apply it when planning my winter garden. Actually, "planning" might be an overstatement. Let me backtrack a bit.

I got my dream garden this year. We started by taking down 12 mature fir, hemlock and big leaf maples. This is what the northwest corner of our back yard looked like at 8:00 a.m. on April 21st, 2009.

At 2:00 that afternoon, the back yard looked like a war zone and that was only the beginning. After the trees came down, the bulldozer came in to pull out the stumps, clear the debris, smooth out the large hump in the foreground of the photo, grade it to a gentle slope and add a gravel driveway and building pad. By the time all was said and done it was late May and time to start work on the garden.

My garden consists of nine raised beds 16' x 4' x 11" and two greenhouses, 6' by 8'. We started construction of the first greenhouse on May 22nd, then constructed the nine raised beds. The second greenhouse was completed on June 29th.

This is the super long way of saying that I got rather a late start on my planting, even though, as you can see in the photo, I started planting before all the construction was complete. The late start set me back for the rest of the season and, since I felt like I was rushing to play catch up, planning got pushed to a back burner. Which brings me back to where I started...

While I have lettuce, spinach, kale and other greens established in the garden, their slow growth means that I'm using them faster than they can replenish themselves. On top of that, most of the lettuce is "well" established; too well established, actually, and is starting to bolt. What's up with that, anyway? I thought lettuce only bolted in hot weather but this lettuce, that weathered our unusual 100 degree days, is bolting now.

Still trying to play catch up, today I seeded nine square feet of raised bed with Red Sails leaf lettuce, Flashy Trout's Back Romaine lettuce, Tyee hybrid spinach, Chinese mustard, blue kale, corn salad and Cherry Belle radishes. These will be growing in cold frames.

I also started two 1-gallon containers each of blue kale, Chinese mustard and Flashy Trout's Back lettuce in the greenhouse about three weeks ago. All have germinated but progress is slow.

All this makes me think that NOW is not too soon to begin planning for next spring.