Where, oh where is the snow this year? That is what everyone is asking. Even last winter, which was mild and almost snow free, we did pick up a little bit of the white stuff but this year you can count the flakes on one hand – technically called a trace. The forecast is maybe of the end of this week we might get some rain turning to snow, but the chance of snow is dwindling each day.  

The good news is that on December 18 ^th , it was cool but mild enough and dry enough to put towels and bed sheets onto the line to dry!! This is indeed a rarity in December and laundry always smells that little bit better when the temperatures are down below 60 degrees.  

While I was hanging the laundry I noticed some strange grass was growing in the strawberry patch so I wandered over to see. Not grass but little onions or maybe garlic is growing!! That is not the only area that is green and vibrant – the herb patch is holding its own too. Mint, thyme and sage are just some of the herbs that I can still harvest fresh for meals.  

So as we head toward the Christmas week, the only chance of snow seems Thursday and the chance of that remaining for a white Christmas is indeed slim. 

Gardening tips abound for this time of year. Gardening is one pastime that never takes a holiday, especially here in California where it's easy to grow crops year-round. It's still pretty warm here in northern California and so it's hard to believe that we are already deeply committed to our winter garden. In addition to tending the broccoli, lettuce and other greens that do so well in a winter garden, there are the never-ending tasks that must be done every fall. Here is a list of gardening tips for October.

Check your soil: summer crops grow fast and strong and there's a reason for that -- they take up nutrients like mad. Now is a good time to check the nutrients and pH of your soil and take action accordingly. Winter crops do best with a pH of 7.0 and you can't go wrong with rich compost to feed your hungry soil.

Clean up: now that your plantings have slowed their pace of growth it's time to prune and clean up. Much of what you gather will be fuel for your compost pile. You'll also want to gather, label and dry any seeds that you want to keep for spring planting and take cuttings from many of your perennials.

Feed your compost: You can rebuild your compost pile by adding all the debris that you're cleaning up from your yard and planting beds. Leaves, trimmings from trees and shrubs along with refuse from summer produce being pulled from your planting beds can all go to rebuild the best fertilizer in the world -- compost.

Plant trees and shrubs: as the weather cools you'll want to install any trees and shrubs that you've been wanting. You'll still have to baby them through the winter but keeping them watered will be less of a challenge than if you had planted them in warmer weather.

Other clean up tasks: clean those bird feeders as you'll be putting them on winter duty to keep your feathered friends happy during the cold winter months. Clean and store those containers that you won't be using through the winter. Inspect, clean and repair your tools. You won't be using them as much over the winter but there's no sense waiting until spring.

Shift and store: bring in those potted plants that you know won't make it through the winter outside. Find them a nice sunny window where they can enjoy the winter months in style.

Time to feed: Hold off pruning your roses until the weather gets much cooler. Meanwhile it's a good time to feed roses, camellias, hydrangeas, azaleas and rhododendrons. Be sure to use fertilizer made especially for their needs.

Winter is coming on here at our Arizona desert homestead and, even though the temperatures are dropping, we still look forward to eating fresh kale, chard, escarole, lettuce, and other fresh hardy produce all winter long with the aid of a mini-hoop house. Don’t be misled by the fact that our homestead is in the southeastern Arizona desert. Last year, one storm dropped six inches of snow on our place. The following week, another cold front brought our temperatures here at the Bear Cave down to 2⁰ F here at our 5,000 ft elevation. Down in the valley, it was below zero. It certainly gets cold enough here to zap most tender growing garden plants without some protection.

Last year, we simply protected as well as we could with row cover. We found that without supports, heavy frost and snow broke down some of the plants under the row cover. While it probably didn’t hurt the nutritional value when we used them immediately, we really felt sad about the squashed greens. They looked pretty pathetic.

So this year, we decided to give them another layer of protection. Our neighbor had done some plumbing in a new out-building and had left a small pile of scrap 3/4" PVC out behind his shop. Our Arizona sun had baked the pieces for a number of months and they were definitely too brittle to make a hoop. Enter the PVC angled joints. With a few PVC fittings, a pair of 45⁰ and one 90⁰, we had our own version of a hoop for our mini-greenhouse. By repeating this five times, we had the supports for our mini-greenhouse.

Barbara, our resident math expert (among so many other things), drew out a plan using the width of our raised bed as the length of the hypotenuse of the isosceles triangle that was then used to calculate the length of the top or diagonal  sections of our “hoop”. In the above drawing, the diagonals were cut at 31".

This calculation gave me a very accurate measurement for the length of the angled “hoop” sections. This resulted in the top sections of PVC being cut to 31” based on the 43” outside width of the raised bed. We determined the rise of the “hoop” by estimating the height of the greens at the edge of the raised bed. In our case, we made the side pieces 14” high.

We assembled five of these hoops to give us a mini-greenhouse with supports every 2 ½’. We dry-fit the joints for convenient dis-assembly and storage next summer

We drove pieces of  rebar into the ground at the outer edge of the bed and slipped the end of the PVC hoop over it. We then tied the PVC hoop to the raised bed with plumbers tape and a couple short sheet rock screws. Besides allowing us to level the tops, this seems to support the hoops well enough to handle both the weight of the plastic cover and the persistent wind we have here. 

We cut off a section of 10’ wide 6 mil plastic long enough to enclose the ends of the structure. The fold in the plastic at the center made it easy to mark and reinforce the tie-off spots with 10 mil PVC tape that we had left over from running our propane line from the tank to the house. We punched two sets of holes in the tape and plastic to create a make-do grommet.

Two sections of light cotton line tied with the ends out on one side and in on the other made a system that allows us to tie up either one side or both sides for picking produce or working in the garden.

On the coldest nights, we raise one side of the plastic and lay in row cover directly on the tops of the plant and roll down and anchor the plastic on both sides.  With the plastic shelter above, we don’t worry about frost, snow, or heavy rain on the row cover flattening our greens. The double layer is a bit like putting a down comforter on the bed on a cold night.

This is a picture of the payoff. Yesterday, Barbara opened the mini-greenhouse and picked a few carrots and some chard to put in our turkey and dumplings. What a great finale to a Thanksgiving turkey feed and a great reward for the work of building our little hoop house.

We are constantly looking for ways to improve the way we build and garden.  Many of you have offered great suggestions. We hope some of you will benefit by the mini-greenhouse plans we have shared. We invite you to visit us at www.grow-cook-eat-beans.com for more about our desert homestead experience.

The Sleeping Garden  

 by 

S.M.R. Saia 

Uneven ground, grass tipped with frost 

Secreting what the summer lost 

A tiny gold key, a Secret Garden charm 

The buckle off the boot that held the Wall-E farm 

Ghosts of groundhogs, rabbits, snakes 

Pieces of wire, bits of hosiery and string 

Toy spades and teeth from broken rakes 

Stones laid and sunken to forgotten things 

The frozen wilt of brassicas and jalapeño bones 

The sleeping seeds of next summer’s volunteers 

Squash and Beauregards and marigolds 

And the sturdy first green of tuber spears 

Still and bugless tundra where potential teems 

A sleeping garden growing only winter dreams. 

My grandiose fall garden plans - lettuce, green onions, pickling cukes and radishes - never materialized.  I can only blame the time bandit. Before I knew it, October was upon us, and I had not planted any fall veggies.  Coincidentally, I had just ordered Eliot Coleman's "The Winter Harvest Handbook" from Amazon.  As I read through each chapter, I became more and more intrigued by this concept of continuing the harvest through the winter months.  If Eliot can do it in Maine, then I could certainly do it here on the Kansas/Oklahoma border!!

As a side note: this is an excellent book, rated 5 stars by 37 reviewers on Amazon thus far and soon to be given high marks by me also.  I found the history of cold weather gardening to be fascinating, as narrated by Eliot, proving that nothing is new under the sun.

And so I ordered a row tunnel cover from Burpee's website and planted a short row of spinach on October 3. This would be my initial foray into cool weather gardening, and so a short row would be my experiment. Spinach is one of the top cold-hardy vegetables.  As such, it will actually prefer our cool fall and winter weather to the stifling hot weather we have in the summertime. Like a nervous mother hen, I checked on my babies every single day, uncovering them to soak up the sun during the day, and lowering the cover at night to protect them from the cold.  As our nights began to dip into the 30s, I draped towels over the row cover for even better insulation.

Above photo ~ spinach sprouts on October 20.  Below photo ~ first spinach harvest on November 3.  

Harvest was estimated for day 42, and yet I began clipping baby leaves for salads at the 3 week mark. As of November 20, the spinach is still doing remarkably well, even though we've had several nights in the 20s now.  Quite honestly, I haven't even put the towels on the row cover at night, and the spinach is still doing remarkably good!

Above photo ~ still beautiful spinach on November 20.  

I'll continue to keep it covered, watered and nurtured as long as it continues to grow.  And I'll count this experiment a success and plant even more fall veggies next year.

When I look at the bigger picture and my dreams... I would love to have a coldhouse (or two!) similar to what  Eliot has in Maine, and supply our local community with fresh greens and root vegetables throughout the cooler months of the year, when fresh, local veggies are in short supply.  Someday!