🥬❄️Vegetable growing expert Dan Fillius shares tips on harvesting spinach, lettuce and even herbs in winter that are grown in a tunnel in his zone 5b, Iowa garden. You really can grow crops year-round and Dan proves it in this January vegetable garden walk-through!
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Welcome back to the Garden everybody it is late January and we’re in a one of these January thaws and I just thought it would be fun to show you after a big snowstorm some deep bitter cold two weeks below freezing wanted to show you what it looks like underneath these
Tunnels where we have uh greens planted from the fall we’ve got our spinach here it is chil out obviously based on how I’m dressed but these tunnels warm things up and allow us to harvest these uh these spinaches whenever it’s sunny out and warm enough so I’ve got two
Types of spinach that you know this stuff reliably makes it through the winter every year we’re going to open up the other tunnel in a sec to see the lettuce which is more hit and miss but is definitely uh made it through this year I’ve also got kale and some onions
That I’m experimenting with here but this spinach has been feeding us all winter uh I come out every few weeks and harvest this and it is is just a a treat really to eat this stuff so there is some damage spinach reliably survives but you can definitely see some of the
Older leaves didn’t make it the younger leaves up here show some damage on here but in the core you know we can remove these damaged leaves and these will regrow and these will continue producing great spinach until April or May so this is uh a really reliable crop for this uh
For here in the Midwest places around the world really um to have over winter in a little tunnel like this there are a couple ways that you can harvest the spinach and one way is to take just the outer big leaves from the base of the plant discarding the ones that have gone
Past and that leaves this nice rosette in the middle and allows for faster regrowth so if you’ve just got a few uh plants that can be a good way to keep your harvests coming however if you’ve got a lot of plants like I do here than just taking the whole
Plant and cutting and discarding the bad leaves like that and putting that in is a faster way overall to harvest I’ve opened up the lettuce tunnel here and just a reminder that again the crop inside needs to be thawed out before you’re harvesting this can happen on a day when it’s below freezing
Outside if it is sunny uh today it’s just above freezing right now it’s sun’s been on these for a couple hours and they’re ready to be harvested so lettuce is not as Hardy as spinach but a lot of these say 50% maybe a bit more have survived and this is a type of
Lettuce single cut salad heads or Salon NOA is one brand of them and this is Salon NOA green Oakleaf where you harvest and it falls apart into little leaves little salad mixed leaves again not all of it’s great in great shape here but it has survived and it will
Regrow for another time so we’re going to pick out any that aren’t any good and put the good ones inside and we’ll wash this up and have a Tasty Garden Fresh Salad tonight for dinner I’m really pleased with how the lettuce looks although it doesn’t always do this
Reliably and I think the reason this year it has done it is we had a really warm fall and early winter and then the only really time that it has been bitterly cold was a twoe stretch and we had a lot of snow the ground wasn’t Frozen yet even when that happened so
Inside these tunnels lettuces were able to have their Roots thawed and they were able to make it through that cold snap a lot easier now I’ve had them survive through the winter one other time but really it’s maybe half the time or two out of five that you might see lettuces
Survive into the next year for a harvest and still not at 100% rate but uh you know lettuce until or Salad until the new year that’s good enough I think cilantro is just about as hearty as spinach and is reliably surviving the winters here in these low tunnels which
I’m excited about I mean I often think of cilantro as being a summer crop right it goes in Salsas with chili peppers and tomatoes but it’s a really nice herb to have on hand for all times of the year so I like having it around glad we can
Harvest some and the beauty about cilantro from the garden is that when I buy it from the store this stuff is you know got a shelf life of maybe 3 days before it starts to turn to Mush and when I harvest this you know in the winter we get these warm a
Warm spell maybe every three weeks when I can get into these tunnels and it’s warm enough to harvest but coming out of the garden like this it lasts in the fridge for three weeks and so I don’t doesn’t go bad I can limp along until the next time I can harvest cilantro
Again from the garden but it’s just oh it’s so good a couple things that haven’t worked out out or that don’t work out in low tunnels I’ve got Dill planted here and this just melted down if I wanted this Dill I would have had to have gotten it before say the new
Year and the same over here I’ve got these Hawai turnips these salad turnips really tasty things but they just don’t stand the root crops they don’t stand up to the to the cold like these leaves do and so these have just you know these
Are compost at this point I got a lot of them before the new year oh well thanks for coming a few take-home messages the crops that are going to reliably live through the winter for Harvest well into the spring spinach and cilantro ones that’ll reliably last until the new year
We’ve got lettuce dill and turnips and kale uh and the reason we have these tunnels up in the first place is if we want to access them throughout these cold months uh these can you know be mulched or under a a blanket of snow and they will
Survive but to get to them in the winter and access them whenever you want these tunnels do a great job of helping you enjoy the Harvest all through the winter
2 Comments
This is exciting to have fresh vegetables in winter! I see you are in IA, Z5b. What weight frost fabric and how many layers?
We dug carrots before the 3rd week of January when we had subzero and left a row under mulch and snow to see how they do after subzero. Z5a, WI.
Last year we had a warm winter with rain in January. This year it was 36 at Halloween and increased to 52 by Christmas and rain. January was 30s, one week below zero, the last week heated up again into now February and 50s by February 8th this week with rain. Then hopefully back to 30s which will still be above normal because I’m concerned the plants/fruit outside will break dormancy. I checked the buds on apples and seen one that looked like it was increasing. It’s concerning because last year everything advanced too far and couldn’t take the unwarned freeze we had on last of May. It killed back a lot and local winery lost 95% of grapes. I thought it was just my low garden, but they are on a bluff.
There was recent news coverage about how to protect flowers in this heat—🙄 should have been how to protect fruiting plants. Those people have their priorities mixed up, but when they can’t get their fruit at the market, they need not wonder why. I think I will need to wrap burlap on the grapes, berries and maybe trees (dwarf) in hopes to keep them cooler/shaded to prevent early growth like last year. It’s a new way of gardening that hasn’t been addressed too much.
You had a nice crop and I will be installing a low tunnel to extend pepper production into the fall and use it for greens later. The peppers always start producing late and it freezes. Why couldn’t the cold arrive in December not October?
This weather is sure messed up. I’m glad we had some snow as this El Niño weather left us in a 7+” moisture deficit.
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