Protecting Your Food Garden from Sudden Cold

Harvest before the soil freezes solid!

When winter hits all of a sudden, like it did here in the Foothills this month, how do you keep your food garden safe and productive for next season?

Here are a few strategies that worked for my homestead staple crops:

As November approached, I was way behind on my winter garden care—I was so busy watering from mid-summer well into our hot and dry October, that I couldn’t get to my other garden chores. And during our extended stretch of smoky days, I was forced to keep my outdoor time pretty minimal.

Still, the real winter weather wouldn’t arrive for several weeks—plenty of time, I figured, to do my usual harvesting, trimming, and mulching.  

But those plans suddenly fell apart: the summery heat and smoke came to an abrupt end with days of chilly rain—it was almost cold enough to snow. While I don’t mind working in cold weather, the rain would make it impossible to keep my hands warm.

So I had to postpone my chores even longer.

Then a new forecast came along: a blustery northeaster was headed our way, with temps down to 14 degrees.

Holy Smoke. This kind of cold could be dire for an unprepared garden.

In any event, it was very abnormal for this early in November. And on the way was a dry system; the food crops wouldn’t get a cozy little layer of snow to help insulate everything.  

All of a sudden, my delayed winter prep needed to happen ASAP. The weather website said we’d have a one-day break in the rain before the blustery winds hit.

 I had to figure out how to pack several days’ work into a few hours—and what my most vulnerable and valuable crops would need to weather the cold.

Blueberries:

On our place, the berries are our most treasured crop—and blueberries are at the top of the list. Luckily, blueberry shrubs are very cold tolerant; in fact, they actually need a good long spell of below freezing temperatures to encourage next spring’s growth.

My 17 shrubs were still well-mulched from this summer. They would make it through the cold okay.

Strawberries:

After blueberries, our second most valuable crop is strawberries. And right now, my little crop of strawberry crowns, still sitting in their wee pots, were my top priority.

Since last summer’s strawberry crop had been almost non-existent, I was really invested in getting good production for next summer, enough for both fresh eating and freezing.

Being in pots, there was a good chance the cold could damage the roots. But to transplant the crowns right before a northeaster, I was risking the plants suffering transplant shock.

Next best option: I could bring the pots into the shop, where they’d be spared the worst of the cold.

So I pulled up a pot and lo and behold: the roots had developed so well they’d grown all the way through the holes in the bottom of the pots and into the soil of the beds.

Well, there would be no transplanting these babies—the pots would have to stay where they were.

But how to keep the roots from freezing?

I raked up in a wheelbarrow-full of maple leaves that had just fallen from our October Glory tree, and piled the leaves around the pots. Then since the Northeaster would surely blow the leaves to either the other side of the yard or to proverbial kingdom come, I weighed down the leaves with short pieces of lumber.

I also had crowns in 1 gallon pots that had been planted much later, so I figured their root systems were still pretty vulnerable. I dug a shallow depression in an empty bed just south of the shop, where there would be good protection from the wind. Then set the pots close together in the shallow hole in a group, and heeled up the soil around the pots.

After adding more leaves all around this group of pots, I weighed this arrangement down with lumber too.

Okay, I had done all I could for the strawberries. Next, another berry: 

Marionberries:

Our largest marionberry is the most productive plant in the garden.

My concern was that the plant hadn’t had a chance to adjust to the cold—but that was out of my hands.

But good maintenance would help—clipping all the spent canes, and tying up the new ones. But that was a fall chore I’d left half-done. And I needed to finish it today: the high wind will whip around the spent canes with the razor sharp thorns, thus abrading the new canes.

It’s not a quick process, to measure out some string or cord, tie up the canes and not get a zillion lethal thorns stuck in the skin of your hands. But luckily I’d left pieces of cord (from tying the bearing canes up this summer) on the wire supports, and that sped up the process.

Late Apples:

Many of our Florina apples weren’t ripe until the last of October/early November. And after a bear got our last three harvests, I was determined to save this year’s for us. Florinas are excellent storage apples, so we’d be set for weeks.

Besides, the price of organic apples at the store will break the bank!

When I heard temps would drop to the teens, I knew the fruit still on the tree would turn to mush. You can bet I picked those puppies immediately! 

Spinach seedlings:

Next was my fall-sowed spinach—wintered over spinach, which is so sweet by the time the leaves start growing in April, is my favorite Berryridge Farm vegetable. But as hardy as spinach is, these tiny spinach seedlings wouldn’t have had time to adjust to temps in the teens.

This fall’s crop had almost been a bust—critters had been eating the tiny seedlings as soon as the first true leaves sprouted. But I had a couple of dozen that had survived. I surrounded each tiny plant with chopped leaves for mulch, and sprinkled compost on top to weigh down the leaves.

Parsnips:

Now, onto the parsnip bed. Parsnips are another one of those crops I treasure because I can’t bring myself to pay $4 a pound for the brown-tinged roots you find at the store.

My crop was small this year—the same critters who had nibbled my spinach had also snacked on the parsnip sprouts—so I wanted to ensure it was John and me who got to eat them!

Happily, parsnips are incredibly cold hardy, but once the soil freezes solid, you can’t get those roots out for love or money. And I wanted to have a few on hand for some vegetable soup I was planning--and not wait for another three weeks to harvest any. 

As the light waned, I pulled out about a dozen. I chopped off the tops, and used them as mulch: set them on the soil I’d just disturbed with the harvesting process. Finally, I could wind things up.

By the time I was putting away my tools, the pink streaks of sunset had already faded to gray. Then I remembered the one crop I’d forgotten.

Potatoes:

Now, spuds are easy enough to find at the store year round. But the price of organic potatoes had been going nowhere but up this year, and homegrown taters are amazingly good.

We’d had another complication with this year’s crop: with our super warm fall, the foliage of half the crop kept growing into October, instead of dying back weeks before—as it should have. 

Since its recommended that you wait until the tops have withered before harvesting, most of my crop was still in the ground.

Retrieving my hand fork, I harvested one hill and managed  to unearth three nice sized specimens without spearing any.

However, the darkness fell so fast I couldn’t see what I was doing. So I had to leave the rest of the crop in the ground. I gathered the brackenfern I'd used as mulch covering the bed and spread it on those last unharvested hills. 

Hopefully, this mulch and the several inches of soil covering the potatoes would keep them from freezing.

It was dark by the time I finished. But as I went inside and started shedding all the layers of shirts/sweatshirt/jacket/hat and so on, I felt pretty positive that I could sleep easy that night: the most important plants had an excellent chance of making it through the cold just fine.

As you can probably tell, mulch is a big plus when it comes to winter garden prep! If you’d like more information, I have a chapter about mulching in my gardening guide, Little Farm in the Garden. Just click the book cover on the right for a free copy!