Now is the time to start if you're planning to extend the growing season into the cold months. Recently I acquired and began reading Four Season Harvest, a book about growing throughout the winter by Eliot Coleman, a resident of Maine (!). I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in vegetable gardening. It's a lot easier than I thought to grow fresh produce even when there's snow on the ground!
Two of the key components of the 'four season harvest' are cold frames and vegetables that have already been planted by the time the weather gets cold. With this in mind, I plan to transform the white fence around my median garden into a cold frame using clear plastic and a set of 'lids' that cover the top of the garden. More on this later; for now I'd like to talk about the flats I'm growing on the back porch. For the most part the seeds have been reclining happily in protected part-shade under a pine tree, and since I took this picture, most of them have sprouted. At the moment I'm growing spinach, onions, broccoli raab, broccoli, carrots and beets. All of these are good bets for late fall or winter harvests. More seeds are on the way via Seeds of Change, a wonderful seed site offering organic, open-pollinated seeds.
Even if you don't have the time to build a cold frame, you still have time to plant for a fall harvest -- now is the time to be flatting out greens like lettuce, kale, collards, chard, spinach, arugula and pak choi!
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