My Everchanging Garden

Gardening That Grows With Me

Extending the Harvest #1

Last April I posted about my new mini-greenhouse that we purchased to use as a cold frame to extend the harvest as far into winter as we could. While we planted some lettuce in the greenhouse this past spring, I wouldn’t really consider that pushing the harvest envelope as April is not that early to start planting cold season crops. So I’d say that this is really our first fall in experimenting with extending our harvest of cold tolerant crops as far as we can into winter.

So far our fall crops consist of:

  • Spinach planted in the regular garden in late August — it is now up about 2 inches
  • Planted in cold frame today: spinach, mesclun mix (2 kinds), romaine, maiche.

My hopes are to get at least 3 succession plantings of cold tolerant greens (thought I’d start with the easy stuff) by seeding the second half of the cold frame in 2 to 3 weeks, then reseeding over today’s planting once the second crop is ready.

I’d happily take suggests for really late season sowing as I’m not sure what crops would be most cold tolerant in our zone 5 Ontario garden. What I can’t figure out is when you open the cover to harvest when it’s freezing what impact will that have on the growing plants? I guess we will wait and see.

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