Source: HGTV
Photo Source: Unsplash
Winter Gardens
Brush up on a few winter gardening ideas to give your green thumb a workout all year long.
A raised garden bed is filled with cool-season vegetables, including (from front) broccoli, Swiss chard, onions, kale, purple cabbage and red lettuce.
Cultivate your love of gardening all year long by trying your hand at tending a winter garden. Your plot of ground might be a small winter vegetable garden, a container garden packed with winter annuals, or a few pots of indoor winter plants. Gardening in the winter can transform your indoor and outdoor spaces with living color.
Much of what you can do in outdoor winter gardens depends on where you live. If your address falls in Zones 7 to 10, you can tend a winter vegetable garden filled with frost-tolerant plants that will grow until spring. In these mild winter regions, you can also plant winter container gardens that survive chilly weather with ease. In colder zones, you can do some outdoor winter gardening, but the growing window will be shortened without providing some kind of frost protection for outdoor plants.
In all regions, the secret to winter gardening is knowing which plants survive the cold. Search out plants that are semi- or half-hardy for withstanding light frosts (29 to 32° F) and hardy ones for tolerating hard frosts (25 to 28° F). Semi-hardy vegetables adapted for winter gardening include Swiss chard, leaf lettuce, arugula, carrots, beets, rutabaga and radicchio. Flowers that fit this category include diascia, China aster, lobelia and petunia. For hardy flowers, plant pansy, pinks, sweet alyssum, painted tongue or flowering stock. Hardy winter garden vegetables include radish, turnip, broccoli, English peas and leeks. A few plants withstand freezes that drive the thermometer to the low 20s and upper teens. These cold-weather all-stars are kale, spinach and collards, all of which grow well in a winter vegetable garden or winter container.
How can you introduce vegetables from your garden into your diet? Why? How could that improve your health? How could that improve the environment?
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