Planning Ahead for Fall
About a month ago I started a new round of cucumber seeds hoping for a great fall harvest to fill the pantry with all varieties of pickles. Cucumber plants don’t like the heat of summer, they prefer temperatures in the 70’s, yet they can’t take a frost. Since we have hot hot summers here in Ohio, cucumbers seem to languish once the temperatures hit the mid 80’s, which is usually right after they start producing. Since this summer has been a particularly hot one, my cucumbers quit producing about a month ago, although I did get almost 2 gallons of pickles from my five plants. This year, I decided to try to grow a fall crop of cucumbers, I’m hoping that they get through their productive season and I’ll have tons of cucumbers to pickle in late September, let’s hope we don’t get and early frost.
I started a whole flat of cucumbers back in July, hoping to get a large number of cucumbers at once so I can make a few large batches of fermented pickles. The seed packet says they take about 57 days to produce, which should be just about right. I transplanted them 2 weeks ago. I planted about 15 plants at my mom’s house and about 20 plants here in my raised beds in the back garden.
I’m once again growing ‘Boston Pickling’ Cucumbers since I really like them. I’ve actually never grown another variety, this is the first I’ve tried and I’m very happy with the pickles that I make from them. This year I’m trying to save a few seeds for them since the place I order most of my seeds from no longer carries them. Not to mention I’ll be saving myself a few dollars, I’ll make sure I post all about it and offer some free seeds.
I’ve read that a lot of gardeners grow second crops of beans and of zucchini to extends the harvests. I tried beans last year, but an early fall frost did them in right when they were starting to produce. It’s always hard to time second crops in a short growing season and with the drastic weather changes we can have here in NE Ohio, but seeds are cheap so I’ll keep trying!
Do you have any crops you grow a second round of for fall harvests?
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Winter Gardening
Earlier this month I spent some time going through Eliot Coleman’s Book, The Winter Harvest Handbook and wrote all the dates for starting fall/winter crops on my calendar (my Chiot’s Run calendar of course). I thought I’d post a reminder for all you other zone 4-5 gardeners that are interested in winter gardening.
Usually for me, seed starting is limited to spring, so it seems weird to be starting seeds in June. I really want to have a fall/winter harvest, and that means it’s time to start fall cabbage, brussels sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower. It’s also time to start leek seeds for overwintering. Next week it will also be time to start carrots for harvesting in October. I actually ordered some of the ‘Early Napoli’ carrots from Johnny’s that Eliot grows for overwintering.
I have all my fall planted crops organized in folders by type in my Seed Stash, so they’re super easy to find. I’ll be starting: ‘Long Island Improved’ brussels sprouts, ‘Ruby’ and ‘Glory of Enkhuizen’ cabbage, ‘DeCicco’ broccoli, and ‘Tadorna’ Leeks. I’m hoping all my efforts will yield a bounty of delicious veggies throughout the winter months to save me time canning and freezing this summer. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.
Are you trying to garden throughout the seasons?
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Building Hoop Houses out of Electrical Conduit
I’ve been getting a lot of questions about our hoop houses that we have over our raised beds here at Chiot’s Run. They show up in a lot of photos. They sure come in handy for covering with frost blankets, netting to keep insects/birds out, supporting peas, as well as for winter garden protection. The first year I overwintered some spinach I didn’t have these hoops over the garden. I simply bent some bamboo poles and floated a row cover over them. This did a fabulous job protecting my spinach crop throughout the winter (we live in a zone 5).
The next spring we decided to build more permanent and sturdier structures for overwintering crops. We didn’t have enough space for a big greenhouse or a big hoop house, so the next best thing was to make small hoop houses over each raised bed. I researched a little and found that a lot of people use irrigation tubing or PVC, which is plastic and pliable. You drive some stakes or rods into the soil leaving 8-12 inches sticking out of the soil or make a base with holes in it to insert the tubing into. I found these photos on Flicker to give you an idea of other options (thanks to oceandesetoiles for these two images)
We decided we’d rather use electrical conduit because of it’s rigidity, we get a lot of heavy wet snows here and didn’t think the tubing would hold up as well. This conduit is very inexpensive as well and we figured it would outlast the irrigation tubing as well. The conduit was $2.19 each length of pipe and we used 4 per raised bed (our beds are 4×10).
Now I’ll have to warn you that pipe bending is not the easiest thing in the world. Mr Chiots and I worked together and our hoops are fairly nice. Not perfect, but not too bad either. I’d recommend buying an extra piece of conduit for a practice piece. The first thing we did to help with even bending was to mark the conduit 21 inches in from each end and then in 2 inch increments in between these two marks.
We used a hand pipe bender and practiced on one or two pieces to learn how much force was needed for a small bend each 2 inch increment along the length of the pipe. We over bent the pipes a bit, so they did not look like a hoop when we were finished. Ours looked more like teardrops since we left the ends straight, then we stretched them back out a bit to put them over the beds.
I will once again warn that this isn’t the easiest thing to do to get these things nicely rounded (read through the comments on this post I wrote about it last year). Mr Chiots and I are adventurous and willing to try to do anything ourselves though, so we were not daunted by the task. We were also OK with less than perfect hoops. We joke that ours have character since they were made by local artisans.
You can now buy a special tool just for bending garden hoop houses from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. They came out with it the year after we made ours. It’s a little pricey at $69, but if you want to make a lot of hoops or have someone to share the cost with it would be a worthwhile investment.
We attached the hoops to the raised beds with two pipe clamps, one up top and one at the bottom. They’re very sturdy and will last a long time. I do love these because they come in handy for so many things. We use them to hold up netting over the strawberries to keep the birds out. We throw row covers over them to keep the deer out of the peas. We also throw blankets over them to protect from late spring frosts.
I ordered some greenhouse plastic this week and I’m hoping to use them as mini greenhouses this winter. I’ll be using a floating row cover on short wickets inside these hoops (you can be sure I’ll blog about it this fall). They also have come in handy to steady myself if I lose my balance or when I’m reaching in to the middle of the bed.
What measures do you use in the garden for extending the season and protecting crops?
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For the Love of Popeye
My spinach seeds germinated wonderfully. I’m guessing I had about a 90% germination rate, which is great. When the plants grow a little bigger, I’ll use the thinnings as baby spinach – yum yum.
Hopefully these will mean delicious spinach salads late into fall and if I mulch it well, we’ll be able to eat spinach very early next spring. I’ll keep you posted.
Anyone else growing winter greens?
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Great Gardening Book: Four-Season Harvest
I’ve been slowly reading through Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long.
