Okay, since spring is arriving, I will do my winter gardening review and my plans for next year. Check here for my winter garden setup.
I planted several things for winter: lettuce, spinach, garlic, leeks, swiss chard, bok choy, turnips, and beets.
The lettuce worked great. I planted Webb's Wonderful Lettuce. My wife doesn't like the taste (it is bitter), but as a plant, it worked perfectly. I had at least three harvests from it over the winter. I certainly will grow it next year, but probably try out other lettuce varieties and see how they work.
The garlic appears to be doing well. It has a long growing season, and letting it grow over winter seems to be helpful. However, I haven't grown it at any other time to compare.
The turnips and beets were total failures. The turnip plants grew, but did not produce any bulbs at all. The beets didn't grow at all. I may have had more success if I seeded them earlier, but I doubt it. I think that, if you want, you can leave beets and turnips in the ground over winter to store, but you shouldn't expect them to grow.
Everything else produced *something* but nothing quite what I wanted.
The spinach is only just now getting ready to eat. So, that means there was no real benefit of winter gardening - it was just sitting there dormant waiting until the weather got warmer to continue its growing.
I planted the bok choy and swiss chard when it was about to freeze, so I shouldn't be surprised that I haven't gotten much from it. The few bok choy plants that sprouted are almost ready to harvest, but the swiss chard is still in its infant state. Hopefully we'll get a growth spurt soon.
I don't know what I should expect from leeks. They are taking a long time, but doing okay otherwise. I think they have a long growth season anyway, so we may have saved time. I'll leave them in the ground and see how long it takes to get a full leek.
I think next year I will try:
This is something I want to try this year. Apparently, you can grow up to 100 pounds of potatoes in just 4 square feet of land! How? By growing them vertically in a box.
Basically, you build a box with removable panels. As the potato grows, you add panels, and then fill it in with dirt. If you buy a late-season potato, it should produce potatoes all through the box as it grows.
Details are here (also here). And someone had an extended blog entry about their own experiences here.
In short,
This is a new blog category - Nature Hacking. Nature hacking is going to be a collection of techniques to leverage nature in interesting ways. The first one is using snow to make ice cream. This takes 2 minutes!
Ingredients: