How to extend your fresh vegetable harvest season

Many gardeners, even in colder regions, inch closer and closer each year to the goal of growing a year-round supply of vegetables.

Corn, peppers, green beans, and okra are tucked away in freezers, tomatoes are canned, and turnips, beets, and winter squashes can be in “fresh” storage in refrigerators, and even cool mudrooms, garages and basements.

Best of all, though, are those vegetables that can still be picked fresh from the garden. No reason to throw in the towel yet: These vegetables can continue on through some snow and temperatures dropping to the teens.

What to grow for fall (possibly winter) eating

Lettuce, endive, spinach and parsley are among the cold-hardiest vegetables. Except for parsley, which requires a long season so needs to be sown earlier in summer, late summer plantings of these cold-hardy vegetables could have begun just as tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and other warm season crops were waning. That row of parsley might no longer looks like a dense green, miniature rococo landscape, but it’s still tasty.

Other vegetables round out the fresh salads. Rocket, or arugula, is quite cold-hardy. A few radishes are still crisp and pungent.

One of the hardiest of fresh salad greens, and also one of the tastiest, is mache, also known as corn salad. The delicate flavor and tender, spoonshaped leaves belie this plant’s tolerance for frigid weather. Rather than plant mache, I just let it plant itself: Overwintered plants self-seed in early summer but the seeds don’t sprout until the cool weather of later summer. I transplant the young plants in early autumn.

Protection to extend harvest

Over the years, my own autumn salad vegetables have greeted cold weather beneath a variety of protective structures. One year, they were sheltered beneath homemade plexiglass A-frames., another year beneath miniature glass greenhouses held together by wires, and yet another year within bottomless wooden boxes covered with clear glass.

This year, I draped “floating row covers” — diaphanous materials that hold in some heat yet allow passage of air, light and water — on metal hoops over my lettuces and endives. Some beds get metal hoops draped with clear plastic, which lets in more sunlight, but not as much cold protection. Now’s not too late to rig up some protective covering for these cold-tolerant plants.

ASSOCIATED PRESS Hardy vegetables such as lettuce, endive, and arugula can be harvested well into autumn even in northern gardens with some protection from “tunnels” covered with clear plastic or row covers.