One Year – One Ton of Fresh Food: Fall Garden Review

By Cathy | November 17, 2013 25 Comments     

http://www.motherofahubbard.com/one-year-one-ton-of-fresh-food-fall-garden-review/

     

Today’s blog entry is one of a four-post series that highlights my garden favorites over the past year — one post per season. I hope you’ll come back and see more stories from the past winter, spring, and summer, many of which I’ve never shared before, here or elsewhere.

Little Bo Peep seems to shiver in the cooler morning air of fall, but there is still time for this tromboncino squash to mature. September 23rd, 2012

Prologue

Big numbers can be hard to understand. When I tell folks that I’ve grown a ton of produce in a year from our 1/10th of an acre garden, their jaws drop. There’s no doubt that 2000 pounds of produce is a lot of food — enough for our family to have fresh vegetables year-round, enough to share, and enough to sell or barter when we really have excess.
That said, let me tell you something: I haven’t done anything that extraordinary here, folks. Thousands of families do this every year, and many of them have larger yields than me (though maybe not in a tiny garden perched on a steep hillside). I simply took the time to document my harvests, and if you did the same, you’d understand how a few ounces of greens and a couple pounds of root crops harvested regularly can add up to an incredible amount of food over time.
Which is why I want to share this past year with you — I want you to see 2000 lbs of produce growing in the garden. I want to help you understand more about what that number means (because really, it’s about more than just numbers).
Most importantly, I want you to believe that this is something that you are capable of doing, too. Growing the majority of food that you consume on a daily basis is possible. It doesn’t take an incredible amount of land, or even flat land for that matter. A little money might be required if you don’t save seeds or need to purchase other supplies, but no stock market will give you a return on investment that your garden can bring. Chemical inputs are optional, as are high-energy inputs like supplemental heat and lighting in fall and winter (I use none of these). It doesn’t take much, other than your sweat and time, to grow your own food.
So… You can do this! Even if you grow just enough for a meal every few days, or as a side to a meal a few times a week, that’s a great accomplishment. Your pocketbook can benefit. Your health will benefit. The planet benefits.

Collecting fall tomatoes with Miss Muffet on September 23rd, 2012. The upper beds are just beginning to show growth of fall/winter vegetables.

 

 

 

 

 

Fall’s Garden

My garden harvest log for fall doesn’t begin until November 1st — it was our first freeze date, and thus the date I chose when starting this blog a little over a year ago. Between November 1 and December 21 (the first day of winter), we harvested 103.5 pounds of food — not a bad total in 7 weeks of freezing weather. What were we harvesting? Primarily Asian greens, broccoli, carrots, beets, turnips, rutabagas, lettuces, and peas.

On the last day of fall, we passed the 100 pound mark with this 6-pound loose-leaf Chinese cabbage.

But we’re going back a little farther than that in today’s post — to the official start of autumn on September 22nd. That’s because to fully understand what fall gardening entails in my plant hardiness zone, 6b, you need to see how it starts. Much of the fall garden has to be planted starting in mid-August so that crops are reaching maturity by the time really cold temperatures and less day-length arrive.

These gorgeous fall broccoli are just beginning to peak on October 21st, 2012 (transplanted to the garden on August 15th).

 

 

Fall marks an ending, but also a new beginning in the garden

At my fall and winter gardening workshops, I’ll have at least one person that asks me how I grow tomatoes after frost. Well, to everything there is a season, and let’s face it — fall and winter are not the much-celebrated tomato’s season. In contrast to cold-tolerant crops, a tomato begins converting sugars to starches when grown in cooler temperatures (which is why you store tomatoes on the counter, not the fridge, right?). Although I can extend the lifetime of tomatoes in my garden a little beyond the first frost of the year, I choose not to. That’s because I would rather have an entire fall and winter of colorful, tender, sweet, fresh greens and root crops, than a few extra weeks of mediocre tomatoes. So even though it is hard to say goodbye, I begin culling tomato plants and other heat-loving garden vegetables after the autumn equinox, as I need their space to begin planting the fall and winter crops.
If you’d like to see more of our garden in early fall, have a look at this video — we’re harvesting sweet potatoes, tomatoes, squash, and more on September 23rd, 2012:

We’re not the only ones cleaning up the garden, however. Prior to and during the removal of spent plants, mulch, and trellises, the ducks are allowed into the garden to remove pests and whatever remaining plants they would like to eat.

Really? These tomatoes are all ours?!

 

 

 

 

The ducks are kept well away from areas of the garden that are in active production. Inexpensive bird netting does the trick, since our duck breeds are too heavy to fly over the 3 ft high fence. Because it is hard to see, I tie bright yarn to it.

Besides sanitation, another reason to keep your garden fenced from the ducks — they love kale as much as you do.

The ducks really go crazy when plastic mulch is removed, as that is the hangout spot for delicious slugs and yummy crickets. I love watching them hunt:

Frost’s Arrival

The real magic of fall gardening happens when the first frost arrives. Watching vegetables freeze and then spring back to life undamaged continues to be nothing short of amazing to me, and I’ve seen it happen hundreds of times. My favorite time to be in the garden, of all times in the year, is the morning after a hard freeze.

Each frost brings a new pattern of ice crystals on plant surfaces (Asian mustard, November 29th)…

And each plant can have a different pattern of crystallization (Japanese Giant Red Mustard, same morning as previous).

Broccoli becomes limp due to dessication from freezing temperatures… (November 6).

but perks right back up once temperatures warm (later in the morning as previous).

If you are new to the blog or cold-weather gardening and would like to learn more about how these plants survive freezing weather (plus how you can give them some help), check out my article on low tunnels.

Now that I’ve given you a little explanation of my garden in fall, I hope you enjoy the following images of the season.

A Fall Garden Bed, Month by Month

 

October 8th. From left, endive, kohlrabi, beets, swiss chard, and carrots.

November 1st

December 1st.

Miscellaneous

Bingo finds a sunny spot in a portion of the garden that I “donated” to duck foraging. November 29th.

Fall 2012’s first snow came before the first frost. October 30th

Freshly washed winter squash ready to go on the curing rack.

Blanching extra snow peas to freeze on November 7th. Most people around here only plant peas in the spring, but they perform great in fall!

This was the year I was adventurous enough to eat weeds like chickweed, purslane, and cress. They are delicious!

This is one of my favorite pictures of our garden. I love the fall colors, the peas blooming at the bottom of the garden, the ducks at work, and hints of the nearby cityscape.

Fall strawberries? Our ever-bearing strawberries shut down in summer’s heat, but picked back up again with fall’s cooler temperatures.

Purple kohlrabi, endive, and lolla bionda lettuce

This was my first time growing semi-heading Chinese cabbage. Their development was so much fun to watch.

Who says seeds need warm temperatures to germinate? Don’t tell this fava bean, sprouting up on November 30th.

A popular image that draws gasps in my fall/winter gardening workshops. I never get crowns this large in spring, but look what happens when they develop during the cooler temperatures of fall!

Broccoli’s close cousin, rapini, on December 8th.

A frequent side to fall meals: roasted root crops (turnips, carrots, sweet potatoes, rutabaga, and beets). Coat vegetable pieces in olive oil and roast at 400F until fork tender.

I love when my girls join me in the garden (especially when they pitch in and help).

Garlic planted in early November, thawing after a hard freeze on December 19th.

A blue hubbard — ready for the approaching winter.

 

Keeping Warm in the Deep Freeze 

If you grew up in the modern West – North America, for example – you probably grew up with central heating, cheap fuel and a near-endless supply of electricity delivered right to a hole in your wall. Generations of us grew up handling the winter chill with one simple technique: reach for the thermostat and crank it up. This assumption of convenience has shaped how we build houses, how we eat, and how we dress for all seasons. It also means that a fuel crisis or depression – or the winter storm that cut power to half a million North Americans a few weeks ago – can leave us completely vulnerable.

Consider, then, that people lived for thousands of years in wintry lands without a thermostat to crank, or without any modern fuel or technology, and obviously did not all freeze to death – nor were they even necessarily uncomfortable. They built their homes differently than we do, they adopted different dress and habits, and lived with a different set of expectations.
Traditional homes in many cultures had thick walls, whose thermal mass absorbed heat during the day and radiated it back during the cool night. Some homes in Ireland, for example, were made of cob – a mixture of sand, clay and straw that could be literally sculpted into a house. I helped built one in County Clare, Ireland, and I’m told it remains cozy inside years later.

Photo: Wikicommons
In many cultures – whether medieval Wales, pre-Columbian America or Ancient Greece – villages were arranged to maximize exposure to sun and light, minimizing the need for burning fuel. Only in recent times have we decided to build without regard to direction or landscape. (1)
“Coupled with other low-tech solutions … passive solar design could all but eliminate the use of fossil fuels and biomass for heating buildings throughout large parts of the world,” wrote Kris De Decker in Low-Tech Magazine. (2)
Of course, many homes used to be easier to heat and insulate, for the simple reason that they were smaller. As recently as 1950, the average new home in the United States was 983 square feet, not much larger than old Irish cottages. By 2004, however, the average had swelled to 2,349 square feet, even though family size had shrunk, and most homes were occupied by just one or a few people. (3)
Realistically, of course, most of us are not going to design new cities or even houses – even if you have an opportunity to build your own home, as we did, budgets and local ordinances might force a compromise with convention. Most people rent or pay a mortgage on an already-built home, and have to retrofit.
Thankfully, retrofitting can go a long way, starting with insulation; according to one organization, 65 percent of American homes have substandard insulation. That wasted energy – whether at the electrical power plant or in the home – has a real human cost; according to a 2003 study, retrofits across the United States would mean 6,500 fewer asthma attacks, and save hundreds of lives and $1.3 billion in health costs. That doesn’t even count the billions we would save in heating costs, the fossil fuels saved for future generations, and the greenhouse gases left un-gassed. (4) (5)
For people who can’t afford new insulation, old clothes stuffed in the attic could also help. Victorians used to insulate inside by putting old wine bottles – empty but re-corked – under the floorboards, creating air pockets. People can simply close off outer rooms and seal them off, keeping heat in areas where people spend most of their time. Trees and vine trellises, moreover, can be positioned to shade homes in the heat and let light through in the bare-branched winter.
You could create your own thermal mass inside your home. A trombe wall is a thermal mass – bricks, black-painted water tanks, anything to absorb heat during the day and radiate it at night. It would usually face the south (if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere), and sit inside your windows – but if you want to build a greenhouse, you could build it on the south side and make your outside wall the thermal mass. (6)
What all these approaches have in common is that they maximize external energy coming into your home (south-facing windows, trombe wall) and keep the heat that’s there from escaping (insulation). All of them, though, involve building or installing something new, and some solutions are even more basic than that – so much so that they are often overlooked. More on that next column.
Footnotes:
(1)    A Golden Thread: 2,500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology by Ken Butti and Jon Perlin, as cited in “The solar envelope: how to heat and cool cities without fossil fuels,” by Kris De Decker, Low-Tech Magazine.
(2)    “The solar envelope: how to heat and cool cities without fossil fuels,” by Kris De Decker, Low-Tech Magazine.
(3)    “Americans want smaller homes, not McMansions,” USA Today, August 25, 2010.
(4)    http://www.naima.org/insulation-knowledge-base/insulation-and-the-environment/energy-efficiency-environmental-savings.html
(5)    “The Public Health Benefits of Insulation Retrofits in Existing Housing in the United States,” Jonathan I. Levy, Yurika Nishioka and John D. Spengler, Environmental Health: A Global Access Science Source, April, 2003
(6)    The Passive Solar Energy Book by Ed Mazria.
http://www.grit.com/farm-and-garden/do-it-yourself/keeping-warm-in-the-deep-freeze.aspx