Thursday, September 23, 2010

Getting Ready for Winter

Here is a picture of the greenhouse bed I took a couple of days ago. I planted, early this month, onion sets, leaf lettuce, Swiss chard, 2 varieties of kale, bunching onions and mache. It is still quite hot here during the day, so at first I watered the bed 2 times a day, but now that everything has sprouted nicely I only water once a day.



The onion sets are making nice scallions already:



Here are the little tiny mache starts:



Bunching onions:



And some dinosaur kale:



Leaf lettuce:



Now, back to the outside garden ~ pumpkins:



And winter squash:



Here is a view of the vegetable garden. My wonderful husband pulled out all those weeds.



And, lastly, here is his wood shed. We heat with wood. This year he bought and assembled a steel carport and has put about 15 ricks of wood in there:



Fall is here. Winter will not be far behind, and hopefully, we'll be prepared.

8 comments:

  1. Wow, that all looks so nice! Do you grow your own onion sets? how would that be done? What is the advantage to growing onions from sets rather than seeds?

    The carport and wood looks So nice, what an awful lot of work! How long will all that wood last you?

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  2. :) The onion sets I saved from what I bought for our spring planting. I had them in a little paper bag in the fridge and most of them survived. You actually can grow your own "sets." I've never done it, but it involves buying onion seeds and broadcasting them fairly closely in a patch. The advantage would mainly be that it would save you money.

    We think we have enough wood for this whole heating season coming up. So, then your dad will be cutting wood this winter to use next winder. The wood in there mostly came from the trees he took out for the sake of our vegetable garden in the yard. It WAS a tremendous amount of work by the time the whole project was complete! He is amazing.

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  3. Everything looks so good. Would be nice to have a green house. Just the thought of fresh onion, lettuce and things sounds so good.

    Before we moved we heated with wood, it is a lot of work. I miss going out to the woods and helping. There is nothing quite like wood heat on a cold winter day.

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  4. Looks great! All that wood is impressive. What is dinosaur kale? Don't let my girls know about that, LOL!

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  5. Cheryl, the same sort of thing can be done in a much simpler set-up. Kale and mache, for instance, and I'm sure there are other things, will stand and you can harvest them through the winter with just a simple low covered tunnel. In fact, I used to grow the lovely curly kale and when winter came, I'd cover it with thick clear plastic weighted down with rocks and I would harvest kale all winter! I also would grow carrots and parsnips and mulch them heavily with leaves or hay or straw to keep the ground from freezing, cover that with plastic and I could dig those things all winter. I highly recommend a couple of books:

    http://www.amazon.com/Four-Season-Harvest-Organic-Vegetables-Garden/dp/1890132276/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1285335686&sr=1-3

    and

    http://www.amazon.com/Root-Cellaring-Natural-Storage-Vegetables/dp/0882667033/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1285335852&sr=1-1

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  6. April, it's just a variety of kale and I have no idea why it is called that! :)

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  7. Wow, What a blessing to have a green house. We do the same thing with row covers too. Everything looks great.

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  8. It is really nice. It is totally unheated/cooled, so has limited application, but works great for winter green things, which is what we needed. My DH got the idea on how to do this from Elliot Coleman's book.

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