Winter Vegetable Garden Ideas

My vegetable garden (at another time of year)

Last night, I attended our bi-monthly Heart of Virginia Master Gardeners Association meeting. We heard a great presentation on raised bed gardening. (I'm so sorry to the person who spoke; I can't remember your name! If anyone knows it, please leave a comment so I can give credit where credit is due.)  The lady who presented grows vegetables for the local farmer's market, and she gave us some great winter vegetable garden ideas in addition to the basics of planning and building a raised bed vegetable garden.

I was pleased and a little relieved to hear that we did indeed plan our raised bed vegetable garden correctly. The majority of our vegetable garden beds are 8 feet by 4 feet, and four feet is about the maximum width for raised beds. Anything wider and you cannot easily lean in to plant, weed or harvest vegetables. It's also a convenient width because the lumber we chose for the beds came in board sizes of 4 x 8, so three 8-foot boards created one rectangular garden bed.

I disagreed with the presenter on the pathway materials she recommended.  She recommends putting down landscape barrier or fabric to suppress weeds, then using wood chips or gravel on top.  Wood chips sound like a good idea, but gravel may not be such a good idea. First, I can't think of how I'd push a heavy wheel barrow over gravel. I think the wheel would get stuck in the gravel and make it even more difficult to push through the garden. But I had also done considerable research when we were constructing our raised bed vegetable garden, and some sources indicated that gravel paths radiate heat back to the plants. For winter vegetable gardening, that's a great idea, but in the hot southern summers I thought it would cook my plants before they got to the kitchen. I chose grass, and I'm pleased with my choice.  The clippings do not go up into the beds as some say they experienced, but I use an old-fashioned push mower and just let the clippings compost back into the grass. The only thing that is a bother with the grass pathways is keeping the edges trimmed; the mower can't cut directly against the wood of the raised beds. If I don't use the weed trimmer every week or so, the grass begins to go to seed, and then I have weed issues in the vegetable beds. But the weeds are negligible, and I much prefer grass than gravel or wood chips.

One idea that I loved from last night's presentation was on winter vegetable garden ideas using raised beds.  The presenter described using chicken wire and PVC pipe frames, with row covers and/or plastic over the top, to create both an animal barrier with the chicken wire and retain warmth. She described how she grew peas last year and harvested them in February - and my mind began to race. I haven't been successful at all growing peas here and maybe it's because I plant them too late.  Now I'm mulling over how I can transform one of the unused raised beds into a winter vegetable garden. It may be possible to experiment with just one bed and see how it goes.

We're doing several things right, according to what I learned last night. Soaker hoses or drip irrigation appear to be the best methods of watering raised garden beds, and it isn't my imagination - the beds do dry out more quickly than the traditional garden beds located directly on the ground. We chose a combination of pressure-treated lumber and non-treated, and the research I did on pressure-treated wood indicated that it is relatively safe; her research concurred with my own.  We are still cautious and plant root crops in beds made from untreated lumber, but it was good to hear that my decisions on construction materials concurred with hers. She certainly had a great deal of experience, and I love learning from experienced gardeners. That was how I learned to garden as a child - by watching, listening, and helping my next door neighbor, Mr. Hoffman, and tagging along after my grandmother, my dad and my older sister.  I certainly learned a lot about winter vegetable gardening, raised bed vegetable gardening and more last night.

Yummy beets growing in my vegetable garden

Raised Bed Gardening Maintenance

Entrance to the raised bed vegetable garden.

Raised bed gardening maintenance took precedence this past weekend.  We had one glorious day of 50-degree warmth, and we took advantage of it to do some much needed raised bed gardening maintenance.  While my flower garden is planted directly into the hillside next to the driveway, the vegetable garden consists of 12 raised beds.  Ten of the beds are 4 feet x 10 feet, and two beds are 10 x 8 feet.  Each is filled with 100% compost we had trucked in; it's the by product of the local paper mills.  We fenced the whole garden area off and put an underground water line from the house spigot down to the garden area for emergency irrigation.

So what kind of chores do you do with raised bed gardening maintenance?  You refill the beds.  I'm not sure whether it's the composition of the soil itself - nearly 100% organic compost - or just the action of hungry plants breaking it down for food, but each bed was down to about half of its soil level since we build the raised bed garden in 2008.  We moved about a dozen wheelbarrows of compost from the pile where the truck driver left it on the lawn before we were too tired to move anymore. It's a surprisingly long distance, and although downhill from the compost pile - you still have to walk up hill to return to the pile and start again!

The next maintenance chore was to repair the wooden sides of the bed.  Several of the longer pieces of wood split where we had nailed or drilled screws in to hold the pieces together.  Several of the boards split, and require a few nails to hold them together.

We got about halfway done before the cold weather and rains returned.  I'm glad we could get a jump on spring, even if it was just for a few hours on a rare warm winter day!

Greens Anyone?

I ran outside to harvest my broccoli rabe this morning before the rain starts. I'm making a warm broccoli rabe, potato and garlic salad for tonight's dinner to accompany the roast chicken. I rinsed a huge bowl of the stuff but still have tons more outside.

Here are photos of the greens bed in the vegetable garden, taken just about a week apart. It's amazing how fast things grow once spring arrives!

May 2....................................May 10!















I love green, leafy vegetables. I write a lot about vegetarian and raw food diets and I always include articles on eating greens.

Garden Update

The rains finally came, and the garden is watered. It's a good gardening rain too - the kind that stops and starts, giving the earth time to soak up the rainfall, pause, then take another drink.

Because of the rains, we haven't worked outside since Saturday. The first draft of my gardening book for beginners went to two writer friends yesterday to critique, and also to one of my former editors who's agreed to edit it. I am very thankful for everyone's time and feedback before it is published later this month!

All of the tomato plants are in and most of the peppers. I was hoping to hide from hubby how many pepper seedlings I had (I admit, I went a little nuts this year planting them and I have yet another flat sort of hidden in the basement, if you can hide something under grow lights) but he immediately saw how many there were. I reassured him we can freeze the peppers and he looked relieved. Actually, there's nothing that conjures memories of the garden like taking a bag of homegrown peppers out of the freezer on a cold January night to make pepper steak or stir fry.

So the tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, acorn squash, spaghetti squash and cucumber plants are in. I planted sweet corn seeds and watermelon seeds. I've also put in two cantaloupe plants. The herbs too are all in, except for the peppermint, which needs a bit more time in the house. I've got tons of basil, cinnamon basil, dill, chives, oregano, rosemary, sage, parsley, lavender, thyme, and calendula all over the garden. I like to plant herbs all around the vegetables.

And lastly, the big news from the weekend working in the vegetable garden: the blueberry bushes LIVE! I was going to pull them out of the fruit garden to make room for more cantaloupes, but suddenly I spied new leaves growing from the brown stem. Hurray! I left both bushes in the fruit bed, hoping they will both make a return.

The carrots, turnips, and beets are all thriving, and yesterday I harvested my first fresh salad right from the garden. Lettuce, spinach, and rashes went right from the garden to the sink to my salad bowl. The spinach was melt-in-your mouth good, not a hint of bitterness like store bought spinach.

I'd better start eating more salads. Yesterday we took both pets to the vet for their annual checkups. And while both got clean bills of health and we got some nice praise from Dr. Gates for our well cared for pets, little Pierre is no longer little Pierre. That darn cat is now 15 pounds! So he's on a diet, and Shadow has to watch her waistline too. Now it's me, Shadow AND Pierre all on diets.

So more salad and bike riding for me...and a little cutback in the crunchies for kitty....and no more cookies for Shadow.

Surprise Gardening

Yesterday, temperatures soared near 80. John asked if I could stop working early to help him out in the garden. He wanted to get some of the deer fencing up around the vegetable beds. The seed starting and planting calendar for Virginia that I printed off the Internet says that we should begin some of the cool weather crops outdoors very soon - St. Patrick's Day, or thereabouts, which is only next week. We're both well aware that our garden is going to be of great interest not just to the deer, but to that fat groundhog we've seen wandering around near the fruit trees. He visits every so often, but just often enough to let us know he's around. Our pair of red foxes left their "calling card" right next to the garden too, and while I don't think they'd bother the vegetable plants - one never knows. So the fence has to go up, and not just any fence. We know we need to have it eight feet high to keep the deer out, and have several inches bow out in an "L" shape and planted below ground so that if the groundhog decides to tunnel under, he'll hit wire - and hopefully give up. We'd placed the fence posts last fall, and one roll of chicken wire was waiting in the garage. We hope this will work, although friends tell us we may need one hot wire - an electric wire - around the top to really discourage the deer. I hope not. I hope they go back into the woods where they belong!

Around 3 p.m. I closed down the computer, changed my clothes, and headed outside to help. I turned the corner around the garage and was surprised and delighted to see not a fence, but a new garden that I could gaze at from my kitchen windows! The area where we'd just placed the old 1950's cement flamingos, the silly things from John's grandparents, and the old bird bath was now a raised garden bed. John was happily angling the corners of the wood to make it an octagon. We have a thing for octagons in the house. When John designed the house, he designed the two towers and the tower rooms - my office, the master bath, the living room and the dining room - as octagons. Once when the electricity went out and we were sitting together in the living room, he read to me by candlelight the passage from Thomas Jefferson's writings that had inspired the octagons. Jefferson noted that in octagon shaped rooms "the shadows cannot gather in the corners" and that was why he had them in Monticello. John and I are both fans of Thomas Jefferson, and John used his architectural ideas as a springboard for his own for our home . We built the house so that "shadows may not gather". Sure enough, in the candlelight, no shadows could gather in the corners - a beautiful analogy.

The new flower bed is a long octagon rather than a perfect one, like the tower rooms of the house, and looks sort of like a boat. In fact, by the end of the day, we had nicknamed it the boat or the rowboat. I took down our beloved silly flamingos and put them in the shed. They need to be stripped again and repainted. They look like they are molting paint. I left a trail of hot pink paint chips on my route to the shed. Jack, John's dad who lived with us, is excited about the new flower bed. He's itching to plant there. My 81 year old father in law has a strange green thumb. There is not a marigold seed he has ever put in the ground that doesn't grow. I say his green thumb is strange because he kills plants that are easy to grow, and things that every garden book on the planet says won't grow from seed, wont' reseed or winter over, Jack manages to do. I have no idea what his secret is - maybe it's just luck, maybe it's just him! I know we'll have some marigolds out there for sure.

It's so nice to have a husband who knows me well enough to surprise me not with store-bought things, but with hand made things. A new flower bed made out of scrap would is worth more to me than a diamond necklace, and I'm grateful my husband knows that! The pile of wood by the driveway left over from when Philip and John worked on the porch is now reduced, and I have a new planting area to play with this spring.

So what should I plant? I need a focal point in the center. It's in full, direct sun. I haven't got a clue. Guess I'll surprise you too!

PS: We got about a third of the fencing done, too, before we were too hot and tired to continue on. It's supposed to rain the next several days, so I guess completing the fencing will have to wait...

Vegetable Garden Takes Shape

After a weekend hauling ten foot trusses up to the top of the new shed (or barn as we've started to call it) and straining to hold enormous pieces of particle board for John to nail onto the roof I have newfound respect for the men who built this house. Three days of backbreaking labor later, we have a roof on the shed and a window in place. Just in time, too, since today the rains came. We've also been hauling wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of compost into the newly completed raised beds, and I've been researching victory garden seeds as well as new fruit varieties to plant. John's mentioned the chicken house too, so (fingers crossed!) that may be one of the next projects. In the meantime, I collected buckets of seeds this weekend, and when the garden dries out again I'll be back in the perennial garden picking seeds for next year. Enjoy the photos!

Vegetable Garden Progress

Ever wonder what 29 TONS of compost looks like? The first picture shows 29 tons, delivered last week by Tom Hertzler. When I told my sister we had a tractor trailor truckload delivered she just couldn't picture it. And I think she wondered why we need it! Now that you can see the progress on the production garden you'll know why. The soil here is clay - hard, red, nasty clay, with some lumps of undefinable gray rock thrown in and beautiful glistening crystal quartz gems. The quartz is astonishing in its color, clarity and splendor. We have one six sided crystal on the mantle in the library. But the soil...after 20 years of loblolly pine, construction on the house, and probably pasture and tobacco growing before the loblolly, the soil is devoid of life. I had it tested and the test results were the worst I've ever seen! The pH was something like 3, soil fertility less than 1 percent, and so few nutrients. Poor soil!

If you also have lousy soil, build raised beds. Raised beds enable you to fill them with black gold goodness and grow wonderful vegetables. Each of the raised beds in the pictures above are destined for either herbs, root crops, or above ground crops. We are filling them with a mixture of 50% compost, 40% top soil from the garden center, and 10% peat moss. The untreated beds in the front are made with standard pine lumber and will be used to grow root crops and medicinal herbs. The remaining pressure treated lumber beds are destined for green goodies like spinach and Swiss Chard, my two favorite green vegetables; broccoli rabe, which you can't find anywhere in Virginia; beans, including some heirlooms I've been dying to try; watermelon and cantelope; corn; tomatoes; peppers; eggplant; and if I'm brave enough, onion sets, summer and winter squash.

I transplanted one poor potbound oregano into the new herb bed. That's the green shrubby-thing. Next year, I hope the pictures show it overflowing!

Note the 'garden gate' John made. It has the cross piece. Once we get the beds filled with compost, the deer netting goes up on the 8 foot tall posts, the gate is put in place, and hopefully I won't be feeding the critters.