Lettuce growing in my cold frame.

When I built my 50 dollar greenhouse over a year ago one of my goals was to be able to have something fresh to eat out of the garden or greenhouse every day of the year.  Well, it’s been about a year now, and  it hasn’t even been very hard to do.

Here is what I’ve learned so far -

Despite what you might have read, lettuce spinach and other salad greens are not really  particularly quick crops.  Sure you can have a pretty little stand of plants in about 6 weeks or so under good conditions, but  in cool weather  they don’t really get productive until they are  almost 3 months old.  Yes you can harvest a few salads out of the thinnings, but the young plants  aren’t going to yield an every day supply unless you can plant a pretty large area.

When it gets cold, growth slows way down.  However, on sunny days the temperature under glass (or plastic) is balmy, and I’ve continued to see steady growth all winter long.  What should be done in the fall is to have a lot of greens grown out as much as possible before it turns so cold that growth slows down.

It’s quite difficult to get those cool season crops to grow productively in Tennessee until late into our rather warm autumns, but once it gets to be jacket weather they do great.  Same thing in the spring – once the nights get warm they fail or go to seed.  So the easy thing to do is to seed dirrectly into a cold frame or green house in September, then seed again every few weeks all winter long and you can have fresh lettuce and spinach from  before Thanksgiving until June.  Last year I had tons of productive growth by late winter/early spring.

You can not only grow, but garden in relative comfort all winter long in a simple greenhouse like my $50 hoop house.

These crops are almost completely freeze proof – especially spinach.  I’ve had temperatures down to 5 degrees with only minor damage to lettuce and none to spinach inside of a frost encrusted cold frame, and even less damage inside of the hoop house for some reason.  It’s easier to keep them growing in cold weather than to keep them from bolting (the elongation associated with going to seed which triggers instant bitterness) in early summer.

One of the beautiful things about cool weather gardening is the absence of insect and weed problems.  There are usually a few of both, but not to the point of being a problem.  Also having productive plants growing in January is really therapeutic to a gardener with cabin fever.

This picture was taken on Nov. 5 - with a little bit of effort (and a cold frame) your garden can be productive almost year around.

I’ve only mentioned cool weather plants in this post, but it’s worth mentioning that in my area most gardens go to the weeds by early August when they don’t have to.  If you want to have a 4 season harvest you have to plan and plant in all 4 seasons as well.  I’ve found that the late summer – early fall is probably the most challenging time because it is hot and dry, and insect pests are at their peak, and it just isn’t very much fun.  Nonetheless with just a little timely effort you can keep your garden productive by planting the right thing at the right time and also yanking out old plants once they stop being productive.

Each flower will soon be a sweet juicy strawberry.

When you visit the nursery or garden center in the Spring you will probably see potted strawberry plants for sale – some already with berries starting to form.  The thing is, Spring is too late to grow any strawberries. However, it’s the perfect time to grow strawberry plants – then you can get lots of fresh sweet strawberries out of your garden next spring.

Go ahead and buy a few of those plants this spring, and set them out 16″-24″ apart in a more or less permanent location in your garden.  If you can bring yourself to do it pluck off those berries as soon as possible – they won’t amount to much anyway – let the plants concentrate on growing.  Keep them weeded and watered, and fertilized this summer, and by fall you will have lots and lots of these…

One strawberry Mother will spread by runners to form many daughter plants. If not thinned in the fall, very few strawberries will form, but each of those daughter plants can be transplanted in September or October and will bear fruit the following spring.

In September, transplant those into your “real” strawberry patch.  You could easily get a dozen daughter plants from each of the originals that you purchased this spring.  Next spring you will be rewarded for your efforts.

Stevia (stevia rebaudiana) is a new world herb that you might have only recently heard of.  Stevia leaves – while having zero calories – are claimed to be 30 times sweeter than sugar, and in fact one of the common names is “candy leaf” – the extract is supposedly 300 times sweeter than sugar!  Stevia is also reputed to have several health benefits including the  prevention of tooth decay and diabetes.  I don’t know about that, but I would guess that using less sugar probably would have those effects.

Is the idea of growing your own natural organic zero calorie sweetener intriguing to you?

These Stevia plants are 3 weeks old.

I’m growing stevia for the first time this year from Burpee brand seeds that I bought at a local home improvement center.  I had heard that stevia was very hard to start from seeds, but I got about 50% germination rate by using bottom heat, keeping them very warm, continuously damp, and supplying 17 hours / day of florescent light.  After 3 weeks I have 6 healthy looking (if a bit slow growing) plants from the dozen or so seeds that came in the pack.  Since I have so few I’m being extra careful with them right now, and making sure that they stay above 50 degrees at all times.

I haven’t really found very much culture information about stevia yet other than that they don’t tolerate cold temperatures, and are a bit hard to start from seed, but easy to start from cuttings, and have few if any insect pests.  I also heard from a fellow in Australia that they grow almost as weeds there because they self seed.  He said that among other uses they put the raw leaves in salads.  I have in mind to try it in some herbal tea mixes, and perhaps brewing a tea with it and using it as a condiment.  I also hope to save my own seeds and perhaps over winter a plant or two next year.  Maybe I’ll sell a few starts at the farmers market if all goes well.

Until very recently it was not legal to even refer to stevia as a sweetener in the United States despite it’s very long record of benign use in other countries around the world.  Stevia could only be marketed as a dietary supplement in the U.S. -  But, now that the sweetener industry is ready to roll out their own stevia products that law has been changed.  Guess who lobbied the FDA to keep it illegal as a sweetener all those years?

Anyway, you might want to consider trying to grow stevia in your garden this year – if you do, let me know how it goes.

Happy Gardening

More information about Stevia