Category Archives: Winter Gardening

There was no science involved in my selection of crop varieties that I hope to keep growing right through the winter, under a layer or two of thin row cover stretched over hoops, aiming for some midwinter trimmings and a bounteous early spring harvest. What I’ve got is what happened to come up and survive among the varied mixture of seeds that I planted in late August. Many succumbed along the way, including all of the spinaches, to my dismay. (I’ve had avalanches of overwintered spinach in winters past.) These are the survivors to date in my garden heading into this winter:

Flashy troutback lettuce, oakleaf lettuce, cilantro, parsley, Russian kale, lacinato kale, collards, red mustard, frilly mustard, arugula, and hakurei turnips.

They are hale and hearty so far after as many as half a dozen subfreezing nights, including a dip to 28 or 27 degrees F. Maybe they’re up for the rigors of making it through a Philadelphia winter with scanty protection from the elements. We’ll see.

I was hoping I’d have a massive crop of spinach under the row covers in my backyard garden this winter. But not a single surviving seedling came of the hundreds of spinach seeds I planted in late August, hoping for a fall harvest and maybe even a crop that would overwinter. What I’m left with under cover from my end-of-summer planting is some oakleaf and speckled lettuce, parsley, hakurei turnips, volunteer cilantro from my summer crop, mustard greens, kale and a couple of collards.

Where was this guy (see below) all summer long when I could have used regular visits by wily carnivores to keep the squirrels out of my tomatoes and up in the trees. I hadn’t seen a fox in my backyard for awhile but I knew they are lots of them here in Mt. Airy near the Wissahickon Creek watershed.

I’m sometimes surprised to see what plants from my fall garden have managed to survive the winter and are surging back to life in spring, often with no help from me. This past winter, I didn’t bother to put a row cover over anything, as I have generally done in recent winters, and therefore wasn’t expecting any early harvest. But this March, in my Roxborough community garden plot, a half dozen long forgotten lettuce stumps sprouted beautiful red rosettes of lettuce leaves, and a patch of cilantro that produced little in the fall was flush with new growth.

My Mt. Airy spinach house, Jan. 6, 2017, after a 1-inch snowfall

I didn’t want to toss off the blanket of snow and pull up the row cover to look, but the crops underneath are deep green and glowing in the sunlight filtering through after a 1-inch snowfall covered my backyard garden last night. The temperature will dip into the low teens tomorrow night. Most of my plants should survive–I’m not so sure about the radish sprouts and last little heads of lettuce–but the spinach, kales and one collard plant shouldn’t be fazed.

Nice place for spinach on a snowy day

I’m less confident about whether the tunnel covering them will make it through the winter. The hoops are too widely spaced and the cover is a mere light-weight Harvest-Guard frost blanket. So far it’s holding up under wind, rain, light ice and snow. I’m not going to press my luck too far, though. If there’s more than a few inches of snow in the forecast one of these days before winter is over,  I’ll take steps to shore it up.

Meantime, here are the salad fixings that I picked on New Year’s Day. Yes, it was a very tiny salad.  Keep in mind, folks, the main goal of my overwinter garden isn’t winter production as much as it is a really early spring flush of greens, from plants that will continue yielding cuttings right up to the edge of summer.

Spinach, lettuce, kale and radish sprout harvested on New Year’s Day, 2017

My Mt. Airy backyard winter garden under a row cover, Dec. 17, 2016

Winter arrived in Philadelphia this past week. For a couple of days, the temperature didn’t get out of the 20s. The low dipped into the teens on two nights. The bout of winter ended with half an inch of snow capped by freezing rain.

Row cover holding its own…so far

The shelter housing my overwinter garden, a thin row cover stretched over wire hoops, sagged under the weight of the frozen precipitation but held up without trouble.

Winter spinach looks hale and hearty on Dec. 17, 2016

The spinach underneath came through it all looking as healthy as ever.