As the weather continues to cool off, things are slow in the garden, which made it easy for us to take a week away to visit family after Thanksgiving. Overall, we’ve had an pretty mild fall, but this week winter is getting real! The day after we got back from our trip, lows were forecast to drop into the 20s for the first time and that looks to be the trend for the coming week. As a result, it was officially time to do the full fall clean up in the garden. Yesterday, I harvested off everything that was left with the exception of the carrots. After doing some research, I decided to experiment with wintering the carrots in the ground. To do this, I heavily mulched them with a layer of fallen leaves and then covered the entire bed in row cover. Both of these will help to keep the carrots insulated from the cold and from extreme temperature fluctuations. I also plan to cover them with a thick tarp on especially cold nights. The idea is that, while the green tops will die off, the roots themselves will remain in “cold storage” underground. I’m a little nervous doing this for the first time as it’s definitely a gamble- we could have a winter full of great fresh carrots or could lose the entire harvest if this technique doesn’t work and they freeze in the ground.
Apart from the carrots, the garden is looking pretty bare. As we rake the final leaves off of our yard, we are dumping them onto the garden beds. This will serve as both a mulch to protect the soil from compaction by winter rain and snow and as a source of renewed organic material as the leaves begin to break down when temperatures start to warm in early spring. For now, we’re making sure to enjoy some of the last fresh output from the garden. Drawing as usual from our favorite Smitten Kitchen blog, we found a perfect recipe for late fall crops- a veggie pancake using cabbage, carrots, scallions, and kale, all things that were still growing in the garden until yesterday. Check out the recipe here!
As winter sets in, I’ll be cutting back to more occasional blog updates, but will continue to share photos, kitchen techniques, and advice for planning for spring, which always arrives sooner than I think!
Comments
Patricia Sterner
December 9, 2016Interesting about the carrots, Katie. I’ll be curious to learn how that works out. Thanks for the pancake recipe too, looks great.
Two Feet in the Dirt
April 3, 2017Update: the carrot technique worked great! Granted, we had an unusually mild winter, but burying the carrots under a bunch of leaves and a few layers of heavy row cover kept the ground warm enough to keep the carrots naturally refrigerated all winter. We’re just working on eating up the last of them this week!