What are you growing in your garden this winter? This is not a trick  question. When you work an organic food garden in ways that bring out the best  in your site, your soil and your plants, winter is an interesting and useful  stretch of time. In most regions, you can enjoy spinach, Brussels sprouts,  sunchokes, kale, carrots, parsnips and other cold-hardy crops all through the  winter. Gardening is a very rewarding hobby however, it can take up a lot of time. If you find it difficult to keep up with your house work and garden don’t settle! Give Maid2Match cleaning in Toowoomba a call so you can focus on your garden.

To help you brush up on your cold-season gardening skills, let’s tick through  the simplest, most sustainable ways to address the three main winter gardening  tasks:

• growing cold-hardy edibles
• using compost, cover crops and mulch to radically improve soil  quality
• enhancing habitats for hard-working beneficial insects and wildlife

No matter where you live, you can make use of climate-appropriate techniques  to bring spinach, kale, chicories and other hardy vegetables through the winter  (see Grow Great Salads Year Round, August/September 2006). You  will need an attached greenhouse in Zones 2 to 4, but in Zones 5 to 7 you can  get by with a tunnel covered with one layer each of row cover and plastic (the  plastic comes off easily for ventilation). Support the tunnel with an arch of  heavy-gauge wire fencing to make sure it can stand up to accumulated ice and  snow, like a green igloo.

Protect Fall Crops

If you have carrots in the ground, take this tip from Eliot Coleman, author  of Four-Season Harvest. In early winter enclose the carrots in  a cold frame, and sprinkle an inch of compost over the tops of the plants. Add  enough straw to fill the frame and close the top. Pull carrots as you need them,  and be prepared to be amazed at their sweet flavor — what Coleman calls “carrot  nirvana.” Parsnips need no protection to make it through winter, but a thick  mulch (or a garbage bag stuffed with leaves) makes it easier to find them and  keeps the soil from freezing. In any climate, early winter is the best time to  harvest Brussels sprouts and sunchokes, both of which benefit from exposure to  freezing temperatures.

Mulched soil doesn’t wash away in heavy rain, but the biggest advantage of  winter mulch is that it moderates soil temperatures, slowing the speed at which  the soil freezes, thaws and freezes again. Because water expands as it freezes,  shallow roots are often torn and pushed upward — a natural phenomenon called  heaving. Winter mulches reduce heaving around winter crops, decrease compaction  from heavy rain or hail, and enrich the soil with organic matter as they  decompose. They also look nice.

Fall-planted garlic, shallots and perennial onions are priority crops for a  4-inch winter mulch of hay, straw, chopped leaves or another locally abundant  material. Mulch kale, too, but wait until after the first week of steady  sub-freezing weather to protect the latent flower buds of strawberries with a  4-inch mulch of hay, pine needles or shredded leaves. Shroud the bases of  marginally hardy herbs such as rosemary with a 12-inch-deep pyramid of mulch to  protect the dormant buds closest to the ground. If you’re really pushing your  luck by growing figs or other plants that cannot tolerate frozen roots, surround  them with a tomato cage and stuff it full of straw or chopped leaves. Use this  technique to safeguard the graft union and basal buds of modern roses, too.

Once you’ve done what you can to maximize the productivity of hardy plants,  either gather up dead plants and surrounding mulch and compost them or turn the  residue into the soil. This will reduce pests such as squash bugs and harlequin  bugs, which overwinter as adults in plant debris, as do Mexican bean beetles and  some other pests. Old mulches can harbor cabbageworm pupae, but these and other  pests seldom survive winter in the wild world of a compost heap or when mixed  into biologically active soil. To be on the safe side, you can create a special  compost heap for plants that often harbor pests or diseases and seed-bearing  weeds.

In spring, after the heap has shrunk to a manageable size, mix in a  high-nitrogen material such as manure, grass clippings, alfalfa meal or cheap  dry dog food (mostly corn and soybean meal) to heat the heap to 130 degrees — the temperature needed to neutralize potential troublemakers.

With this housekeeping detail behind you, think about what next year’s garden  will demand of the soil. Sketch out a plan for where you will plant your  favorite crops in spring and summer, and tailor your winter soil care practices  to suit the needs of each plot’s future residents.

In areas to be planted with peas, potatoes, salad greens and other early  spring crops, cultivate the soil, dig in some compost, and allow birds to peck  through the soil to collect cutworms, tomato hornworm pupae and other insects  for a week or two. Then rake the bed or row into shape and mulch it with a  material that will be easy to rake off in early spring: year-old leaves or  weathered hay, for example. Spring planting delays due to soggy soil will be a  thing of the past.

In the space you will use in early summer for sweet corn, tomatoes and other  demanding warm-weather crops, you may still have time to sow a winter cover crop  such as hairy vetch, Austrian winter peas or crimson clover (see 8 Strategies for Better Garden Soil, June/July 2007). Cover  crops make use of winter solar energy, energize the soil food web as their roots  release carbohydrates down below and amass large amounts of organic matter. The  deep roots of hardy grain cover crops such as cereal rye will spend the winter  hammering their way into compacted subsoil, and nitrogen-fixing cover crops can  jump-start soil improvement in new garden beds and save time in spring.

For example, if you get a good stand of hairy vetch growing in fall, simply  cut the plants down in mid-spring (or pen your chickens on the bed), allow the  foliage to dry into a mat and plant tomatoes right into the mulch.

For all those “to be determined” spots, you can enrich the soil and prevent  winter erosion by tucking beds in with compost, mulch or a hybrid of the method  I call “comforter composting.” Piles of organic matter in any configuration will  turn the soil’s surface into a compost factory. Several 3-inch layers of dead  plants, chopped leaves, spoiled hay and other mulch materials will compost  themselves when placed atop unemployed soil.

If you would rather make a mountain of compost from autumn’s haul of yard and  garden waste, why not locate the pile in a place where it will travel across  cultivated soil as you turn it every few weeks? A “walking heap” leaves a trail  of organic matter in its wake, and nutrients that leach from the pile at various  stopping points go straight into the soil.

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