Autumn and Winter Gardening | OR, Portland

by Hive of Industry

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” ― Albert Camus

Got 1/12th of an Acre?

We’re relatively new to intensive food gardening. We live on a 1/12 of an acre in SE Portland, Oregon, where we’ve removed the front and back lawns and have strategically placed a total of twenty-two raised garden beds throughout the yard in an attempt to grow a fair portion of the food we eat.

One of the first lessons we’ve learned in our pursuit to grow more is how enjoyable it can be to garden year-round—if you’re able—past the summer harvest and on though the fall and winter months. Here in the Pacific Northwest, with the right combination of hardy vegetable varieties and a few inexpensive self-made pieces of infrastructure, you can eat fresh greens from your yard even when temperatures drop below freezing, all while your onions and garlic and leeks overwinter.

“Gardening year-round in even a modest amount of space can expose you to types of food that possibly weren’t on your growing or eating radar previously.”

Unlike summer gardening, tending to your plot in the fall and winter comes without the burden of constant watering and minus various garden pest plagues (slugs, aphids, etc). For the best results in our space, we’ve planted cover crop throughout most of the north-facing backyard garden (this is “green manure” that helps fix nitrogen and other important nutrients in the soil over the winter which you till under a few weeks before you begin spring planting) where the sun has a harder time reaching, and have strategically planted the south-facing front yard garden with several frost-tolerant vegetables.

Depending on where you live, you very well may be able to grow a substantial amount of kale, chard, collards, spinach, beets, arugula, and even radicchio. Under simple cover—we built two cold frames or cloches with inexpensive lumber and green house plastic—you can extend the growing season for many types of lettuces and mustard greens, too. Last year, for example, we enjoyed a fresh salad from garden on New Years Day and much of the autumn crop lasted all the way until March.

Gardening year-round in even a modest amount of space can expose you to types of food that possibly weren’t on your growing or eating radar previously. In addition to dinner salads, this fall we’ve experimented with juicing a lot of our produce in the mornings for a delicious start to the day.

One closing note: be sure to keep a close eye on the weather through these colder, darker months. On several occasions this past month when temperatures fell into the low teens at night, we’ve covered a few of the garden beds with blankets and made sure to add lots of straw between plants and rows to help keep them warm. With a little bit of planning, and some attention to the forecast, you could be eating fresh greens throughout the winter until the farmers markets open again this spring.

Hive of Industry is a Pacific Northwest-based husband and wife pair (author Evan P. Schneider and stylist Judith Edwards) exploring the simple life and taking tiny adventures. They currently maintain a small urban homestead in the Montavilla neighborhood of Portland and in 2015 will begin reviving a shy, off-the-grid cabin in the woods near Cloverdale, Oregon.

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