Failure, er, Hard Lessons in the Garden

My poor garden is very nearly as neglected as this blog (insert sad face here).

Despite having high hopes for winter time harvests of fresh, tasty vegetables, I made some crucial errors that resulted in "less than optimal results." Or a complete and utter failure.

As previously mentioned, I got started a bit too late with my fall/winter crops. Then I was caught completely unawares by a hard, prolonged freeze in December, with temperatures dipping into the teens for several nights. As a result, my broccoli, which had been the jewel of my garden, now looks rather sad. Or dead.

Before the deep freeze hit, I did harvest a very tiny head of broccoli and a small-ish head of cauliflower. As I was preparing to cook the cauliflower, I found one of these hidden inside. It appeared to be dormant. Or dead.

Either way it wasn't very appetizing, which isn't to say that we didn't eat it anyway.

To combat my abysmal ignorance on the subject of winter gardening, I purchased Winter Harvest Handbook: Four Season Vegetable Production for the 21st Century by Eliot Coleman. Mr. Coleman winter gardens on a huge scale. With actual success.

One tidbit I've already gleaned concerns day length, which controls the amount of growth you can expect from your vegetables. So even though my winter temperatures are (usually) more moderate than those in Maine, where Coleman operates, I'm farther north and have shorter days. Accordingly, I have to plant my winter harvest crops earlier so that they can achieve usable size before day length drops under ten hours.

Luckily for me, the U.S. Naval Observatory has conveniently posted the requisite data right here, which means that I won't have to record careful observations on the time the sun rises and sets in my area, which means I won't have to endure another "learning experience" next fall.

What once looked like this:

Now looks like this:

And if you think the broccoli looks bad, you should see the cauliflower. I'm not posting a photo out of blogging courtesy to those with weak stomachs.

The one thing that appears to have survived the cold snap unscathed is the corn salad, or mache.

I realize that doesn't look all that promising, but I assure you, the visible damage is from pests, not Jack Frost.

There are also a few spinach seedlings surviving under one of my coldframes.

I'm disappointed and in addition to that, yes, I'm taking some heat from my husband as the not insubstantial cost of the establishing the garden was sold with the promise of fresh vegetables in mid-winter. But, like generations of gardeners before me, I'm hopeful, if not yet confident, that I can win my bet with nature next winter.

First Frost; October 25, 2009

We awoke to a light frost this morning. A bit late; in our location near Woodinville, Washington, we usually see frost before the end of September.

I wanted to verify that so I turned to the Sunset magazine website; their gardening maps provide a much greater level of detail than that available from the USDA but the information I found left me shaking my head and wondering if perhaps their weather data had been gathered in an alternate reality.

It's a bit hard to tell exactly which zone we'd fall into here because the map can't be enlarged quite enough, but I'm saying Zone 4-1/2. If memory serves me, the "growing season" (obviously some stuff grows all year - dandelions, for example) for my garden microclimate is mid-April through about the third week of September for summer crops such as beans or tomatoes.

My confusion underscores the need to keep accurate records. Not that I've ever followed that advice. I tend to be a rather haphazard gardener but I'm trying to change. So...if any of you have stumbled across a good method of journaling your garden info, I'd love to hear it.

Now my winter gardening begins in earnest.

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.