I have had a few people ask about my winter garden boxes so I thought I might as well blog about them.
The book I use as my reference is called the Winter Harvest Handbook. It is by Eliot Coleman. He has a farmers market/Garden and Maine. For those who Garden, I think main is zone 4. I live in Ohio which is zone 6. I figure if he can get things to grow up there in Maine in the winter, I should be able to get things to grow here in Ohio in the winter!
Up there, they grow a diverse selection of produce in the winter that does not require a lot of electricity and heat, therefore not a lot of money to run. He has a lot more acreage, obviously, and therefore has room to have really awesome mobile cold houses and a super nifty setup of rotating covered garden boxes. I have found that best just to stick with two or three garden boxes and I only grow spinach, carrots, and maybe radishes & beets.
Kale.
Kale is pretty good for a winter garden box. But honestly no one of my house eats it. Except for that one time when we had a pet iguana. The Iguana loved kale!
This year we moved the garden boxes from the left side of the back porch over to the right side of the back porch, next to the TARDIS. This is because my husband plans on extending the porch on the left side sometime this fall, winter, spring.
Monday we dug the dirt out of the garden boxes and move the garden boxes, then hold the dirt. Today I purchased some goodies to add to the dirt.
The first thing to note here is that I have one purple and one lime colored gardening glove. I used to have a pair that was purple and a pair that was lime. Thankfully I lost the proper glove of each so that I still have a pair.
( adding gardening gloves to my Christmas / birthday list)
I purchased sand and Perlite. Because carrots like loamy soil. Which I guess just is a fancy word for "has good drainage".
Loam
Does it rhyme with foam? Because although I have seen it written many times in many places, I do not think I've actually heard it said aloud. I guess it might rhyme with the word doom.
I also got a small bag of worm castings to add a bit of fertilizer.
Sprinkled a little bit of each into the garden boxes.
* note: garden boxes probably are not required. I just find them to be a little bit easier. I have done carrots and radishes without garden boxes. But with tramping through the snow and lifting off the cover, I just find the garden boxes to work better.
I put on my purple gardening glove and then I grabbed my hand held dirt mixer thingy. Then I put on my lime green color to gardening glove. And then I mixed all of the good nutritional goodies into last year's dirt.
After they were all mixed thoroughly, I made three rows and a smaller box and planted the carrot seeds!
They won't need to be covered with the hoops and plastic until November. So I have some time to make their hooped covers.
... stay tuned for the planting of... Something else later this week
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