Come to a killing frost, and most vegetable gardens are given the cold shoulder by their owners and the weather.
Yet there is a long list of vegetables you can plant (from spring to fall) that beautifully grow long after heavy frosts and real freezing weather arrive. So this is something to think about.
Cautions on Cold Weather Crops
Seedsmen are cautious about exploiting cold weather crops. Generally, there isn’t a hint in their catalogs of the opportunities in this almost unexplored phase of gardening. But the opportunities are there, even for gardeners of northern and central zones.
In Pennsylvania, for example, a seedsman I know makes a game of seeing how many winter garden vegetables he can grow in his plot.
It is a challenging and rewarding game. There are hazards, of course. But it is an unassailable fact that certain vegetables stand up defiantly to heavy frosts and hard freezing.
Growing Vegetables During Winter
The gamble is not can you grow vegetables when temperatures drop below freezing? It is how long you can keep them going. Some years harvest is over by Thanksgiving here in Perkasie, Pennsylvania; other years, the winter garden is still producing something at Christmas.
Experimenting is a way of getting more produce per square foot of the garden and dividends in good eating. Unfortunately, these late vegetables are often overlooked. Many in the following list fall in the luxury class and seldom are available at the grocery.
Finally, a winter garden just is not much trouble! By late fall, bugs disappear, weeds slow down, and often nature does the watering. Of course, if rainfall is light, you must water. But, by and large, your main chore will be to mulch certain crops and to wear earmuffs when you harvest.
These vegetables are arranged according to when I plant them in Perkasie. Per is perennial; Bien, biennial.
Light Or Heavy Mulching
If you want to stretch the harvest to its outermost limits, you can do a lot by light or heavy mulching with hay, straw, or whatever is available.
Place a thick mulch on all root crops to keep the soil from freezing, and you can dig vegetables all winter.
For example, if celery is hilled up with dirt clear to the top, protected along the sides of the row with wide boards, and covered with a heavy layer of straw or hay, you can cut it until Christmas or later.
As for lettuce and endive, if you put branches or chicken wire around plants and pile straws around the chicken wire, you will keep them going through December.
Baskets or boxes upside down over clumps of chives and parsley and covered with a thick mulch will usually keep plants green into the dead of winter. With parsley, put mulching material under the foliage to keep it off the ground.
44659 by Sally Wright