A garden for all seasons
Here are the basics to get you started on growing year-round
Is it really possible to garden year-round?
Yes, even in Nova Scotia. Through years of experimentation, Niki Jabbour has developed an all-seasons approach to edible gardening, despite the rigors of her Halifax location, where frost can linger until late May and return in early October.
What Jabbour — an intrepid vegetable gardener and the host of the radio show “The Weekend Gardener” — calls her “vegetable garden tool kit” doesn’t include a trowel and pruning shears. Her essentials are an assortment of fabrics and the supports she drapes them over.
In a place with such a short traditional growing season, Jabbour might have been content simply to master cooland short-season vegetables — colorful cauliflowers, every texture of kale and a diversity of add-on salad ingredients, including miner’s lettuce (Claytonia), mizuna and sorrel. But once she started down the toolkit route, she kept pushing, then pushing some more.
Today, she counts on reliable harvests of coveted Lebanese ingredients like cucumber melons (also called mekti, or Armenian cucumbers) and perennial Syrian oregano (to make za’atar). They’re grown to delight her in-laws, immigrants from that Mediterranean subtropical zone, who now live nearby in a climate that is anything but.
In the process of stretching her growing season in both directions, Jabbour has reaped some extra harvest-maximizing benefits: She has learned how to outsmart squash bugs, flea beetles and cabbage worms, and even much larger pests, like the deer who visit daily. Her zone-cheating, season-extending tool kit, it turns out, is an effective barrier against more than just weather, and that versatility is the subject of her latest book, “Growing Under Cover: Techniques for a More Productive, Weather-Resistant,
Pest-Free Vegetable Garden.”
Jabbour’s adventures in limits-pushing started simply enough, with the impromptu use of row cover late one October, maybe 18 years ago. She was planting garlic and noticed a patch of arugula still going strong despite recent frost. She covered it with some fabric she had used in spring over tomato transplants when the temperature dipped briefly. “We harvested arugula till Christmas,” she recalled.
Jabbour suggested her mostused basics to get us started.
What do you want to grow, and when?
Successful zone-cheating and pest-prevention depends on matching tools with garden goals. Is your obstacle heat, frost, insects or animals?
In a short-season area, where it’s hard to mature a full harvest of heat-lovers like peppers, eggplants and melons if frost descends early, a mini hoop tunnel covered in greenhouse plastic sheeting is an effective defense.
A crop that benefits from a certain kind of protection at one end of the season — like tomatoes that begin outdoor life shielded by a piece of row cover — may need something else at the other end.
“It’s hard to have a fabric-covered mini-tunnel over a fullgrown tomato plant,” Jabbour said, “so I might just wrap them in fall in lightweight or medium row cover attached to their wooden support stake.”
Lightweight row cover offers defense against insects, as does that plastic mini-tunnel — but inside the tunnel it’s too hot in summer for crops like lettuce, cabbage and broccoli.
Knitted shade cloth meets another challenge, blocking some light, depending on the weight chosen, which makes midsummer seeding easier.
“A lot of crops for fall and winter harvest are planted in summer, when soil is hot and dry — which seeds don’t like,” Jabbour said. Shade cloth slows soil-moisture evaporation,
aiding germination, also slowing bolting of spring lettuce, arugula and spinach as summer heat arrives.
You need three basic materials
There are many weights and brands of material, but to get started experimenting, Jabbour recommends investing in three: a lightweight row cover, a knitted shade cloth and durable, clear-plastic sheeting.
Start with the fabric row cover: Jabbour recommends Agribon
AG-19, which lets in 85 percent of the light and is rated for insect protection and light frost, offering about 4 degrees of insulation for temperatures down to 28 degrees. For insect protection alone, the lighter Agribon AG-15 lets in 90 percent of the light, but with less heat buildup, so it can remain in place in summer.
Next, choose a black or green knitted shade cloth, offering 30 to 50 percent shade.
Jabbour’s third essential:
6-mil greenhouse-quality plastic, UV-treated and rated for a fouryear life span. Garden centers may sell this by the running foot.
When you’re not using your materials, fold and store them. But first, be sure to clean them, as accumulated dirt reduces light transmission.
Choose the right support
Various materials fashioned into hoops can straddle beds and support the covers. On Jabbour’s 4-foot-wide beds, 10-foot lengths bent into hoops will rise to about a yard high at the center, depending how deep the ends are buried.
Many gardeners start with nine-gauge wire, which is more than adequate to support lightweight covers for pest control or shade. Half-inch PVC conduit is a step up, in easy-to-bend 10-footers.
The key to a tightfitting cover on half-inch supports: special greenhouse snap clamps made for the job, about three for each hoop. In windy conditions or to keep insects out, the bottom edges must be buried or weighted down with lumber or rocks.
For mini-tunnels from which she harvests carrots, Asian greens and other crops all winter, Jabbour rolls 1-by-2 lumber in the hem and screws that into the raised bed’s edge.
“Even with those little screw holes in the poly,” she said, “I end up reusing it for years.”
When to apply covers
To outsmart spring frosts and keep out insects, put your cover on at sowing or transplanting time. “With seeding, you could wait,” Jabbour said. “But hey, the extra warmth may hasten germination and growth.”
A caveat: Cabbage worms, flea beetles, squash bugs and other insects may overwinter in the soil in some life stage. So crop rotation — moving brassicas, cucurbits or nightshades to a new place in the garden every year — must be paired with row-cover use. “Otherwise, it backfires, and you’re trapping pests under cover with their favorite food,” she said.
Some crops require pollinator access to set fruit, so with cucurbits, for instance, Jabbour removes covers when the plants flower. “By then, they are usually robust enough to withstand a little pest pressure anyhow,” she said.
Lightweight fabrics may discourage larger pests like rabbits, woodchucks or deer. You could also invest in bird netting or chicken wire as an extra-tough cover that’s effective even when birds, chipmunks or squirrels dig seeds or uproot seedlings.