 |
| Winter Vegetable Garden Free Leaves - Texturemate |
This winter we decided to try something new. We have a
constant problem with leafy vegetables in summer – they bolt as soon as they
can – likely due to the hot dry climate. So after numerous failures of getting
a decent salad’s worth of leafy greens, we decided to try planting them in
winter. In SA winters are cold, but the sun warms up the earth and no snow
falls – so you can get away with planting a few vegetables.
 |
| Bok Choy - Brassica rapa chinensis |
.JPG) |
| Baby Dash Spinach - Spinacia oleracea |
So we planted some spinach, bok choy, sweet rocket, loose leaf lettuce, and iceberg lettuce – along with some peas, as our peas get plagued by black aphids during the warmer seasons. In the pumpkin patch some of our ‘lost’ onions of the summer season took the opportunity to grow in the absence of the squash, which works out fairly well as the plot isn’t used for anything else. I suppose radish and turnips will come up too, but we don’t like these much...
Anyways. To our delight the winter planting of leafy greens,
peas and onions works quite well…
.JPG) |
| Loose-leaf Baby Lettuce - Lactuca sativa |
.JPG) |
| Sugar Snap Pea - Pisum sativum var. macrocarpon |
Some random potatoes also sprouted in the pumpkin patch, due to some last
minute winter rains – probably missed them during harvest, but I doubt they
will produce anything decent – but if something comes from it, I’ll report
back.
After some snooping about on the internet I found
that you can also plant beans (we are on the hunt for limas), broccoli and cauliflower
(I have had success with these, although not in winter, but will feature them
in a vegetable of the month article), carrots and beets (not in our garden,
can’t get a good worth of root out of them before summer) and dill (I am
surprised at that – so I’ll gives it a go anyways J).
Basically, southern hemisphere gardeners (warm
winters with no snow or frost) need to get vegies into a plot that gets at
least 6 hours of sunlight, protection from winds, some additional help of
regular fertilising (2-4 weeks) and frost fleece if necessary (our frost only
comes around during August, about a month before spring). As a rule of thumb, winter vegies will take about twice as long as they would to harvest in summer.Those of you in the
northern hemisphere should do winter gardening under glass tunnels or
greenhouses J.
 |
| Leafy greens two weeks later |
 |
| Winter Vegetable Garden |
P.S the huge plant in the background is the sweet potato still going strong after being planted in spring, it is supposed to be dead by now, but it doesn’t seems to be quitting any time soon J!
Do you have a winter vegetable garden?
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Please share with fellow gardening enthusiasts via the various sharing buttons at the end of posts/pages! Else you can vote for posts through the Google reactions bar at the end of articles. To stay up to date I have provided several reader and social networking platforms with which to subscribe: Twitter, Pinterest, RSS Feed Reader or Email/Follow directly using the Blog Followers widget on the left hand side toolbar. Thank you for reading and please feel free to ask if questions arise - I appreciate comments and ideas too! 😆
_________________________________________________________________________________
