Winter gardening in eastern Tennessee is a challenge, especially at 2500 ft. We've always known that our small farm would have to be unique in order to compete with others. It's a known fact that we can't grow heirloom vegetables any better than other farmers using the same seed and practices. Our tomatoes don't sell any better at the Farmers' Market than other farms do. In order to set ourselves apart, we've tried to be creative. That's one reason why we're opening our campground. Most farms don't have 80 acres of mountain forest land backing up to a national forest for folks to explore.
As I've mentioned before, we're huge admirers of Eliot Coleman and what he's accomplished on his farm in Maine. Last summer I read his book on winter gardening under a hoop house without heat. The more I read, the more I was inspired to try it here. Growing salad greens in the dead of winter in an unheated hoop house seemed to fit our simple life style perfectly!
For a copy of his book "The Winter-Harvest Manual- Farming the Back Side of the Calendar", go to his farm at Four Seasons Farm - "Winter Gardening Guru extraordinaire" , I added that part. The subtitle says it all... Commercial Greenhouse Production of Fresh Vegetables in Cold-Winter Climates Without Supplementary Heat. It may also be noted that this book was published in it's 15th printing in 2001 and Eliot is continually experimenting with way to increase his production efficiently.
Snow on the Mountain...
This is a picture of our farm on April 14, 2004. Every time I doubted our success with this idea, I just reminded myself that the snow must be much deeper in Maine!
The first obstacle was to build a hoop house big enough to have at least one planting bed in it.
This is the small hoop house we moved to the front yard last spring (08) so it would be closer to the house when we started seeds for the garden. We also propagated a bunch of soft cuttings under the intermittent mist system in this house. Check it out on our Plant Propagation page. Be sure and read Ed's snake story there!
Although this small hoop house served us well, it was a pain in the pitootie to use. We'd talked and dreamed for years about how nice it would be to have a hoop house large enough we could walk into and grow those winter garden greens ourselves. With our new-found knowledge of winter gardening, we had the perfect excuse to try our hand at building one. The big question was: how big to make it and what to frame it with.
Well, as good fortune would have it, our friend and neighbor down the road at Bee Berry Farm (you'll hear more about her on our Farmers' Market page) had a prefab garage kit with a canvas cover, brand new still in the box, which the previous house owner graciously left. We swapped a dog pen to house their new puppy Lydia and free salad greens for the mysterious box and we had a start on our winter gardening adventure. The garage kit is 10 ft. wide x 20 ft. long x 8 ft high. I thought I could replace the canvas cover with greenhouse plastic and we'd be in business.
The site in the picture above is an ideal site for a hoop house except for the steep slope. I handled that problem by using a bunch of old landscape timbers which we'd removed from flower beds my dad built about 25 years ago. We recycle everything here at Blackberry Blossom Farm and our winter gardening idea was perfectly suited to reusing those timbers.
Our New Hoop House!!
As you can see, I built a retaining wall on three sides of the site just large enough for the hoop frame to fit on.
The frame just bolted together and was then bolted to the top of the walls.
The lower side of the house was dug out and filled with soil from an old raised bed we moved to enlarge our black raspberry patch. This is the bed we would try our first winter gardening in a hoop house in.
The upper side of the hoop house will be filled with gravel and be used to start our garden plants in the late winter/early spring as well as our mist system for plant propagation in early summer.
I didn't get the end walls framed in as I had intended, so for this year I just covered them with plastic. The right "door" side in the picture is covered with two overlapping pieces of plastic to allow us to get in. The flaps are held together on the bottom by a big rock. We have plenty of those lying around...
BBRRRR!!!! Baby it's cold outside!
It's 22 degrees as I write this on Nov 21st, 2008. I covered the bed with a floating row cover to add additional protection for the greens. The only thing we put on this bed besides a row cover was water as needed to help them grow. Simple winter garden greens at their finest.
Not bad for a first try, huh?
This is what's under the row cover. Winter Gardening at Blackberry Blossom Farm is a success!
We've been cutting and eating these greens since three weeks post planting. The greens are very tasty, not bitter at all and with absolutely no insect damage. Bee Berry Farm friend, Janel says she likes them better than our summer greens. I think we agree.
We've been eating these for weeks and of course sharing with our friends and neighbors. We'll be updating our Compass Garden page for cold season crops we planted in late summer, so take a peek at that.
Sunlight and Time for Growing Winter Gardens...
I remember reading somewhere, I believe it was in one of Eliot Coleman's books, that plants do not grow any more after the daylight length drops below 10 hrs each day. The length of daylight depends mainly on your latitude. I put on my "nerd hat" and found an equation on the internet which calculates the length of any day at any latitude. I wrote a short computer program which does these calculations and displays the daylight length for every day of the year. It also counts the number of days below any daylight threshold (such as 10 hrs) and calculates the amount of time each day is below the threshold.
The whole idea seems a little silly I know, but my idea was that maybe grow lights could be used during the below threshold times and the plants would continue to grow all winter. I’m sure the 10 hour threshold is not exact. Few things in nature are. It turns out that where we are in East Tennessee, daylight length drops below 10 hours from Nov 25th through Jan 18th. The shortest day, which is Dec 21st of course, is still 9 hrs 41 minutes long. Grow lights over the beds for a hour at dusk just might do the trick.
We'll post results as we acquire the data.
Update: Jan 30,2009
The winter greens did very well until late December. The shortened daylight didn't seem to have much affect on them growing so I never tried the growlights. They survived a 10 degree F. night with little damage but in late December a cold front dropped the temperature to -2 degrees F and the salad greens did not survive. However, we have some carrotts and kolrobi planted in the same bed and they are still growing! We replanted the salad greens in late January. We have had some days in the fifties, but it remains to be seen if the soil in the bed warms enough for the seeds to germinate.
Update: Dec. 2009
This has not been a good year for our farm. All of our crops suffered from the recent drought followed by a really wet summer. We did have hopes for the greenhouse though. I finally enclosed the front end and installed an old screen door we found at a second hand store and covered it with plastic
Two weeks before Christmas a winter storm with very high winds blew the plastic out of the back end of the green house. The next day, the temperature dropped into the teens and killed what crops we had growing. The week before Christmas the storm shown here dropped 13" of snow.
Such is life in these mountains!
When the weather breaks a little, we will clear the beds and replant and hope for the best!