PROTECTING GARDEN EDIBLES
Pre-winter tips for your garden
What are you going to give thanks for this weekend? Many readers need only look out their back window at their bountiful vegetable harvest.
The long, hot and dry summer was just what the doctor ordered for heat-seeking veggies like tomatoes, peppers, squash, and beans.
Maybe not so much for cool crops like broccoli and brussels sprouts, but the world does not need any more of them, anyway, in my opinion. People like me can enjoy this year’s crop of carrots and tomatoes, the gardening equivalent of having your cake and eating it, too.
Your late-season vegetable crop still relies on your attention in order to produce at its best. Remember that a plant generally produces more fruit when ripe fruit is removed.
Why, do you suppose, does a zucchini produce zucchinis with such gusto? The answer is to feed the seeds. The squash on your vine were not designed for you, but for the reproductive rhythm of life. Squash life. Squash plants, just like humans, have an urge to reproduce. It is another basic tenet of life.
So, when you pick a small, edible zucchini (versus one that is large and fat, with no taste and more heft than a sledgehammer) you are sending a message to the squash mother plant: make some more.
Mother plant produces blossoms, which attract bees and other pollinators, and the fruit is once again set so that a new zucchini is hatched for you to enjoy before it explodes out of its skin.
Even if your veggie plants have run out of time to bloom and set edible fruit, the simple act of removing what is there now encourages the plant to concentrate its energy in the growth of smaller existing fruit.
If it is fruit-bearing, it will continue to please you in this way, but only if you continue to pick what’s ripe.
This does not work for carrots or beets or turnips. You pull one, and you don’t get a new one in its place.
Garlic is a crop that is completely counterintuitive. You plant them now, in the fall, as a bulb. They grow a bit before the hard frost of late autumn and more in the spring. Come July, they produce a pigtail scape with a flower bud on the end of it. If you cut the scapes before they bloom you can eat them or sell them for profit.
Mid-August, you dig up your garlic, lay it in the sun for a few days and then in a well-ventilated place for a few weeks. If you did this in August, you now have fresh garlic, ready for use. Braid it, sell it, consume it, give it away and hang on to some of it to plant in your garden now.
If you don’t have any garlic of your own to plant, you can pick some up at a garden retailer. They are generally displayed with the Holland bulbs. Or better still, go to your closest farmers’ market and pick up the locally grown stuff.
If you are the least bit ambitious, I recommend that you build a cold frame to extend the harvest time of many of your favourite veggies.
A cold frame is really a “warm frame,” as it sequesters solar energy as a greenhouse does, but in smaller space.
As the ground under your cold frame absorbs heat during the day, it radiates warmth through the evening. This creates the perfect environment for sowing some mesclun mix, leaf lettuce, kale, Swiss chard or anything that produces an edible leaf. And radishes. Nothing grows to maturity faster than radishes.
One last tip regarding edibles: this is a great time of year to plant winter-hardy fruiting trees and berry bushes.
Browse through your local retailer and look for suitable specimens of apple, plum, cherry and pear trees or any berry bush. You won’t find the same selection now as you will come spring, but this is a better time to plant, and you just might find some end-ofseason bargains.
Thank goodness, indeed.