Wow, welcome to winter in the mountains! From the mid 70’s all the way down to 8 degrees one night, the weather here has been all over the place. My garden beds don’t seem to mind though, thanks to Eliot Coleman and his Four Season method of gardening.
I put a single layer of row cover over my tender spinach, lettuce, mustard and kale plants. I’ve built hoop tunnels using PVC pipe and that got covered with plastic. And, on the two nights of single digit temps, I added an old sheet over the top of the plastic on all but one bed just for extra insulation. That part was my idea, not Eliot Coleman’s. And guess what??? It worked! All my young plants have survived overnight temps that would normally finish anything off!
There wasn’t enough row cover for one bed of tender young red romaine and spinach so all it had was the plastic and the sheet on the hoop tunnels but even that bed is looking good. Here’s what the garden looked like after an overnight low of eight degrees —
Heavy frost on all the plastic and – when I opened the plastic to peek inside – the baby greens were frozen solid. But, after a day under the plastic with the sun warming things up to the low fifties, the spinach and romaine had completely recovered and were as crisp as they were before becoming green popsicles! While the baby plants recovered and were just fine, the fully matured romaine in the same covered bed did not survive the really low temperatures and I harvested the broccoli because it looked like it had suffered. But the young stuff came right back and we had some in a salad last night. Dee-lish!!
