Winter Gardening -- Low Tech Podcast, No. 78

[Music] in early February we were at the Wisconsin garden expo where I presented and we tabled last time we heard about gardening in a warmer more variable environment and this week we'll be going the other way talking about winter gardening this is the lowtech podcast hello and welcome to another break from our current season I'm Scott Johnson from the low technology Institute your host for podcast number 78 on March 8th 2024 coming to you from the lowtech recording booth thanks for joining us we're still taking a break from our tour of cooksville in 2100 to hear about how gardeners can extend their growing season into the winter this was recorded live at the Wisconsin Garden Expo and this is the last time I'll say not to bother following us on Twitter X or whatever it's called right now we don't post there anymore but you can still like us on Facebook find us on Instagram subscribe to us on YouTube and check out our website lotch institute.org there you can buy both of our podcast as well as information about joining and supporting The Institute and its research also you know the spiel about advertising on podcast if I'm not doing the ad someone else is getting paid we put out all of our content for free but if you're in a position to help support our work and be part of this community please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as $3 a month through our patreon page that's patreon.com lotch Institute supporters do get the podcast a week early another way to support us is to donate your used car if you're in the US contact us for details again we're about to get going with the recording but two housekeeping items first uh first this is a live recording unedited so the quality may be slightly less than usual and also the slides referenced and the talk are available on our website's blog or can be seen if you're watching this on YouTube enjoy today uh I'll be talking about four season growing in Wisconsin um who am I I'm Scott I run the low technology Institute and we think a lot about how we're going to be living in the year 2100 uh in terms of Four Season gardening uh that might be pretty easy for us as we will be probably losing our worst month by the year 2100 our growing season will be very different we'll have lost our coldest month and we'll gain a new hot month in the middle so if you like tomatoes that's good for you um and if you like keeping your plants alive through the winter that's also good for you um you know there's obviously some negative repercussions to warming temperatures but I'm not talking about those today um yeah so like I said these slides will all be up on our website uh shortly we also have a podcast called the lowtech podcast and we put that on YouTube as well as the usual podcast um apps and places uh and I'll have these slides as the background so if you missed anything I can listen to this all over relive the experience all right today's uh topics are uh Baseline assumptions uh Baseline and assumptions biological adaptations methodological adaptations and infrastructure uh so that's kind of how we're split up now the first thing to think about is where are we we are in why are my notes not coming up that's not good Ah that's not good it's okay I have came prepared um we are in DF a or a uh Continental humid climate with a hot summer that'd be Zone 5A and 5B that's where we are right now obviously this will be changing over time but that was my last talk I gave a talk uh yesterday and the day before about gardening and a warming Wisconsin so I'm really bracketing both ends of things here um so yeah we're right there on the edge depending on where you came from you might be 5A or 5B or maybe somewhere farther a field welcome assumptions okay so today uh I said four season gardening I could have said winter gardening cuz really honestly I'm not going to get too much into the summer other than how you can better prepare for fall uh winter and spring gardening uh so I'm going to assume that we all have some background knowledge about growing during the regular season so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that um I'm hoping that you might have some experience with seeds starting things like that because sometimes I'm going to suggest experiments that are better uh if you can start your own seeds rather than having to buy them in just for you know economy sake um so yeah I'm going to be talking about extending the season into the fall into the winter starting earlier in the spring or continuing from the fall straight through into the spring um I'm going to touch a little bit on indoor gardening uh there was I really wish this talk had been earlier in this in the uh week uh weekend because there were some indoor gardening talks that would have been helpful because I'm not going to talk about dedicated indoor gardening I'm going to touch on bringing outside stuff in um and all the bugginess that that could entail um and fun that can be uh but I'm not going to talk about starting growing uh the entire life cycle of a plant indoors although that would be a method to grow in the winter I'm just not going to get into Hydroponics or anything like that um some winter crops uh are for direct eating others are for uh keeping viable plants in stasis but uh I don't I'm not going to get into or really talk about the the likelihood of us starting growing and expanding uh a lot of plants in the winter really winter uh and late season growing early season growing is really just about keeping plants alive and really making your garden into an outdoor refrigerator uh so you can take from that all winter or go into the spring with incredibly large mature plants that then explode once the the temperatures warm up again so it's uh getting a really early start you think you're getting an early start on the season by starting your seats now imagine if you had started them in August right like that's going to be a lot a lot more uh if you can keep them alive through the winter um so a lot of the information and uh images will come from books that'll be listed at the end of the publication again publication will be on our website tomorrow morning on our blog um so couple caveats so we like to talk about full sun well remember full sun in the winter is like 5 hours which is not really full sun and it's a glancing sun right like so the the angle of the Sun is going to be putting out less watts per square meter or however you want to measure it uh so there's just less sunlight so that's why we're really not talking about putting on growth in the winter we're going to be keeping things alive they're going to put on their growth in the fall and then hopefully just maintain that trinter um even if cold hearty the plants really aren't putting on a a lot of green growth in the winter so you're just keeping your cabbage and your brussels sprouts um winter hearty varieties are slow growing they're often short stubby and they have a lot of dry matter why is that well dry matter doesn't freeze if you have really leggy tall quick growing plants so you put on a lot of uh nitrogen fertilizer for example uh those will freeze a lot easier and they're not going to survive uh into the winter months um so their problem is these types of varieties are uh um not as economically viable they don't grow as fast so there's not as much market for them so you have to kind of look around uh Seed Savers is one place Bakers uh there's a couple others that have these specialized varieties that are a little slower growing um and are for the kind of specialized uh Winter Market I always recommend people do AB testing now if you've never tried to keep something alive through the winter then you're just doing a testing I guess B testing would just be letting it die uh but AB testing means do what you usually do and then do half uh of what you're doing a new way and then you can see does this do better than the way I've done it before or not because a lot of times I have people I grow a lot of potatoes I've done a lot of potato research for a small scale and folks will come up to me and say oh last year I grew my potatoes like this and it worked out great I said okay compared to what well just great like well okay maybe it was a great season and you could have just thrown potatoes in a pile of leaves and they would have done great right so you need to have that comparison and so I really encourage people anytime you're taking on a new method or a new idea or even a new plant variety do AB testing do what has worked for you in the past and then try something new next to it and see which one works better for you and then take the winner of that and do more AB testing or if you're really into it do ABCDE EF testing you know uh but uh that way you're likely to get something that you've had success with before or maybe you'll find something new that works better uh with less risk of losing everything if you're be if you just try the new thing and it fails um and saving your seeds again I'm coming at the tail end of the garden expo but there there's a lot of resources out there for you to uh be able to learn to save seeds uh take notes um I I'm going to develop I came up with this product in my last talk um I'm coming up with a garden calendar or a garden um a notebook for you and it's going to be perfectly tailored for the garden notetaker half of the book is going to be March April May and then the last little bit of the book a couple of pages is going to be July August September because that's exactly how much Garden notes we take we're all very good note takers in the first 3 months of the gardening season and then in the last couple of months you could put it on a postcard um guilty also so um but it is important to save your seeds uh with notes so that you know oh we had a really hard winter we had a really easy fall we had you know really wet fall um so that you know which varieties are working better for you in these different conditions not that we can necessarily predict is this going to be a wet uh and warm win uh fall and winter or is it going to be a dry and cold one we don't we can't predict that but what we can do is if we know we have you know hot or cold wet or dry there's only four real options that you're dealing with and so if you have four varieties that you plant going into the winter with knowing that three of them are legely going to die or possibly going to die or do not as well as the one uh you're going to get something to survive the winter um and if you're saving your own seeds that doesn't cost you very much right because the seed cost is essentially just your own time which is invaluable I know all of our time is invaluable um all right I don't get paid by the hour any I don't get let's not get into that okay specific varieties so before I put up the next slide and I see you all pull out your cell phones and take pictures I have these what's on this next slide as a handout and I probably have enough for everybody otherwise it's going to be at our booth or online so deep breath there's going to be a whole bunch of varieties here you don't need to memorize them yeah that's why like I said these are on the website I prepared you and I still got an O Okay um so yeah these are just a a collection of suggested from various winter gardening sources of varieties that do well um in the winter in cold weather they have their approximate temperature gradients and this doesn't mean that's the temperature your thermometer says that means that's the temperature in the bed where it's living and we're going to talk about how we can you know uh really try and save ourselves with the mechanical stuff later on we're still talking about varieties so these are some of those that uh if you can find them uh are likely to do a little bit better again I have a handout so don't worry uh I'm going to move away from this now did anyone get them all written down no okay um see me afterwards if you did you're be a speed reading Champion okay um couple of warnings when we start talking now we're going to talk about methodological adaptations so whatever you do start slow don't say I'm going to winterize my entire garden and I you spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours your first year try a better two right like try work up to this um I don't take that advice but I should no um I'm getting better at taking that advice as I get um and also think about uh how you eat and what you eat raw veggies have a lot more nutrients so think about planting things for the winter that are going to be uh more easily eaten uh raw or at least close to Raw things like spinach kale lettuce um are are often better better choices than things that need a lot of preparation where you're going to lose a lot of those nutrients right cuz you're going to be getting lettuce of them but you're going to be getting some green in the winter which is nice um again let me stress again you expect very little growth in the winter we're converting our garden into basically storage space and stasis for plants rather than uh somewhere that's going to put on a lot of green leafy growth in the winter just not we just don't have the solar uh energy so um one thing that we can do think about your soil uh soil drainage is a big factor low low spots collect water and cold air and so if you have a well- drained soil um it can uh keep plants from suffocating uh their roots from suffocating as uh as that water pools and accumulates and doesn't get uh transpired or moved around by the usual processes that are at play in the summer um and you can get rotting in your roots and then the plant dies uh so you could go as far as installing drain tile or a raised bed with a good draining soil U maybe picking four beds or so that you're going to convert into your winter beds and and putting a bit of investment into having a well- drained soil there um or I had a a person in a previous talk who lived on Sand so she's already set but then she has to try and build up nutrients anyway so that's a different kettle of fish um sand already drains well it warms and cools really quickly which can be a detriment in the winter if it cools too quickly um but if it's cooling without moisture in it it's less detrimental to the plants than freezing solid with lots of moisture in there silter clay LOM like what I'm on is as clay uh is slower to warm but also slower to cool so you'll get a bit of attenuation into the fall but it does drain poorly so I try and grow on top of that dark soil obviously absorbs and maintains heat better so dark mulch I'm a big uh mulch fan uh is a is a is an option that can help uh push the season a little farther if you have that dark mulch rather than straw which is light colored and bounces a lot of um of solar radiation off obviously we want to build up a large hummus layer um that's air rated pH stable it'll hold a more even temperature nutrient dense I mean it's not rocket science to say the better your soil is the more the better your plants are going to do um so we're all working towards that anyway um so yeah compost compost compost uh as much as okay so what does good soil well- drained soil look like uh it's loose and has good gr growth but not the type that has uh jumping worms go through it uh that's not the type of looseness that I'm talking about um I did a vermac compost talk and everyone's asking me about vermac compost or about jumping worms which thank goodness I luckily I don't have experience with but I know others have and it sounds pretty nasty um bright soil color not Dull we all yeah you've seen that bright healthy looking soil uh looks like it's uh very happy that dull uh sheen on it is really frustrating um earthworms insects are in it although in the winter they're all going to go down and become dormant water obviously uh drains well through well- drained soil that's kind of self fulfilling there um you really want that moist cakey type of uh feel rather than a uh a Soden uh sponge or anything like that crumbly texture and a balanced pH again gold standard we can't get everything um so soil nutrients again composting building up the soil's nutrients is more important in Winter and it's also important going into the winter so in that fall you don't want to throw on a ton of nitrogen you don't want to build up a lot of green leafy growth that has a lot of vascular tissue that's going to hold a lot of water because that water freezes and can help kill the plant more quickly so it's a balanced slow growing approach slow and steady will win the race in the winter U manure is okay uh evaluate your Source obviously um I get a lot of manure nor from a local horse stable uh again you don't want to over apply that nitrogen go for a balance that too much quick growth in the fall like I said weakens the stems they Die slow and steady say it again um cover crops particularly Clover I like Clover uh is easier to cut and work into the soil than cover crops used with bigger equipment so there's a lot of winter rise stuff like that perfectly fine if you've been doing that and it's working for you great I like Clover because you can just kind of turn it right in uh to the soil um and I put that in a lot of my beds I wouldn't necessarily be trying to overwinter this but this is a good uh thing to toss into beds before they go to sleep in the winter clover will do fairly well in pretty cold temperatures anyway um so mulch big fan of mulch if you were at any of my talks yesterday probably spent half the time talking about mulch uh straw can insulate but like I said straw will bounce a lot of the sun off the soil so straw isn't necessarily the best bet uh dark mulch which can absorb heat and regulate moisture but I'm not talking about wood chips wood chips will uh sap a lot of nitrogen out of the soil although if you're applying a lot of nitr fertilizer maybe that would no uh generally speaking wood chips will uh sap too much nitrogen out of the soil and aren't as good uh but a dark vegetative uh mulches can be really helpful it absorbs heat it regulates moisture because even though we're in the middle of winter you're still on a warm day every couple of weeks you're still going to want a garden uh uh water and I'll get to irrigation here in a minute um o sorry have a little more oops uh root vegetables can be heavily mulched for over wintering so instead of storing your carrots in your basement in a pile of sand like I do uh you can actually if you can keep the ground from freezing you can mulch them pretty heavily um and then go through and dig them in the winter on warm days um for or you can be trying to overwinter uh a few uh carrots for seeds the next year because they'll take a year and a half to seed um too much sawas or wood chips again saps nitrogen from the soil you are best uh your best bet is to apply mulch before the ground freezes once the the ground freezes it mulch will just keep it frozen longer so you want to get that Mulch on there uh in earlier in the fall and so uh obviously mulch uh is a organic adjunct and will break down and add uh nourishment to your soil suppresses weeds which I'm going to get to here in a minute regulates moisture and temperature prevents erosions all great things uh that we want to be looking for in the winter um sighting in microclimates so again my my small joke here is that microclimates would be what I would call kids laser tags if I were going to open one uh but microzones can be created but with as little as a stone wall or other infrastructure plants uh trees things like that in your garden uh they can bump up your gardening zone uh a zone or even two if you're depending on how you're doing it so uh right now we're in 5A but if I put this stone wall running east to west in my garden in front of it that might be you know six or maybe even seven and behind it might be a four right and so for the winter obviously we're going to want to be growing in front of it bit uh because that's going to help maintain and radiate that that the few sunny days we've had lately uh uh but it will help radiate that heat and maintain that heat uh into the bed south facing slopes beds south of a building walls or even uh an arbor V uh can give a little bit extra sun and temps through the winter um and protection from northern winds so even like uh sometimes old farm buildings would be built uh around a central uh yard and Central yard would be protected on multiple sides to help uh keep it a little extra warm in that in that little patio area um and that could be a good gardening spot um and then there's of course you know using valleys or um larger scale topograph to site your plant um Hedges are great but they're really slow to mature so if you were putting Hedges along the north uh a North edge of a growing space um that's great but uh it may take a little while walls are good um although actually Hedges are better in some ways because uh walls will create a backdraft and it will actually drop if it's a cold North Wind it can drop a lot of snow and cold uh right after that wall and create a circulation whereas a little bit of air passing through uh makes less of a low pressure Zone and so the Winter Wind can actually blow off of those crops so uh it's it's nice if you can get a little bit of pass through on those walls that are preventing those cold North winds from coming in um also think about cold air kind of like a water right it sinks into low spots and will sit there so if you have uh a completely solidly fenced yard and it gets full of cold air coming in from the north uh it can just be held in there whereas if you let that cold air seep out on the southern side uh you might you're going to be better off so so for example this is my backyard um in my garden and these are kind of like my microclimates and the way that I did this is well one way uh which is kind of nice right now and especially for winter gardening this is applicable go into your garden ah most of us have at least in my garden the snow is pretty much gone but if we get a snow and then we get a sunny day walk through there a few times and watch where the snow melts first where the snow melts first are good spots potential spots for winter garden beds because those are getting the most Sun for some reason that snow is melting off of there faster um those are really great spots to be think about your winter beds in the summer things might be slightly different cuz the leaves will have uh leafed out on the trees but for me what I did in the summer for my different microclimates was I looked um I went out every hour on the hour and I marked where had Sun so each one of these is how many hours of Sun and so I have my hot spots I have my cool spots um and I plant accordingly like right here behind my this is North over here this is South down here right here behind my house uh I have probably Zone Seven it's uh protected by the garage and then trees and then trees and it's a nice really warm uh growing space so I can grow some pretty Southern stuff there uh in the winter it's also pretty nice um and then yeah it it varies through the yart but you can do this with yourself uh if we get another good blanket of snow and then a warm sunny day walk through and look where melts first um and that can uh be a good guide for you so every variety is different um some need to be mature before they freeze others need to be mostly done with growth um others can be really small and make it through the winter it depends on the Garden or it depends on the um on on the variety and um so you're going to want to time your fall plantings just like you carefully follow your uh time your spring planting so that you have a appropriate amount of growth a lot of things like cabbages uh and brussel sprouts you'll want to have pretty much fully grown by the time it starts to freeze real hard if you want to be picking mature because they're not going to put on any more growth if you're trying to get your starts going for the spring already in the fall and you just want them to get mature enough um that's a different story they don't have to be quite as big all right I have what's on the next slide also on the handout so you don't have to freak out um so this is from territorial your results May Vary um but this is a good place to start uh this is a really great chart of stuff to start going into the winter when you could start it um how large you want it to get before you're transplanting um it has Frost hardiness it has all kinds of useful information on here so worth uh having a start here and then modify according um it doesn't have dates on here because it's kind of a space agnostic I mean I guess it does have dates but we can shift these uh depending on where you are uh it it'll take trial and air because your backyard your garden space might be a slightly warmer one than your neighbors right so it's it's very individualistic all right beds um you need to space them out a little bit more in the winter uh you can't have as much tight spacing as you can get away with in the summer just because the solar resources are so much uh less and also you want to encourage large Roots um which will help support them through the winter rais beds are a great option because raised beds have frames that you can attach things to uh because you know I love to accessorize uh for the winter uh and for our purposes accessories are things like row covers that we're going to talk about in a little bit but having that raised bed frame work is really helpful for attaching things to also keeps you from walking on them uh they're often better drained so raised beds are a great candidate um all things being equal for your winter beds rather than in ground in ground's great you can do a lot with inground but rais beds are a little more easy to work with easier to work with Okay weeds and yes so this we're not just you know it's not just going to be your cabbage that lives through the winter because you're going to make this little microbiome for them to live in uh we're going to have or microzone uh we're going to have a great environment for weeds and pests to go through the winter too hooray hooray um so this is in one of my I call them pods uh one of my little uh obviously uh I needed to weed that before the winter um and I hadn't opened this in months and I popped it open I'm like oh crap uh and all of my cabbages and these cabbages were these were not for eating in the winter these were cabbages to start so like when I start in when I weeded this and then I started these you know that's a pretty good start for you know April or or I guess um March right but they're all ready to go in December and then they made it through the winter and then boom I had really big nice cabbages really early in the year um because I wasn't these weren't for winter eating these were for spring starts um but yeah the weeding here was abysmal I don't know I have to get my assistant on that prot what's that protection for your yeah um that's coming up in just a few slides yeah that's that's the big thing is the the dust is a protect oh the weeds yeah exactly yeah exactly um pest should be evaluated with an integrated Pest Management you want to go into the winter with as few pests as possible I mean that's true anytime right we don't want to leave them around but you want to be have a plan uh or do some research and come up with a plan to try out that year um as we have less uh severe Winters that's more more time in the summer and the fall for our pests to proliferate and to um weaken our plants going into the winter if you've had a lot of pest trouble you might you you if they've been weakened by pests you might just as well Harvest them uh rather than try and get them to go through the winter you want to call and have only the healthiest plants going into the winter um Geographic ranges are going to expand um I found in my research recently that contrary to what I had thought which is uh oh the colder a winter it is the more likely it is kill a lot of bugs uh a lot of pests in the ground and that actually Studies have been shown that that's not the case because the the insects get down the pest get down low enough that 20 below doesn't really affect them um it's a slow damp Cool Spring when the fungus wakes up and the fungus goes out and eats lots of dormant insects before they can emerge so it's actually a cool slow damp spring that will bring down some pest some pest load uh rather than a severely cold winter although I guess you can have some winter kill um harvesting eat the worst looking ones first so if you have a row of 20 cabbages pick the one that's not looking as good as the others you want to leave the best looking ones unless you're having like you know a pope over I don't know who do you have over I don't know uh then you then you can pick him a good cabbage to the pope uh but yeah if you're all things being equal pick the the less goodlooking ones the longer ones or the the the best looking ones will last longer um so yeah this is my little this is my he's almost five now um but yeah we are just picking some of our fall vegetables don't harvest the plants um if it's below freezing uh many of these plants can be perfectly fine outside while it's freezing but then don't bring them and put them in the fridge for a few days before you cook them pick them right before you're going to cook them if you bring them in and let them thaw uh rapidly they're going to disintegrate right so you want to pick them and then eat them um or pick them when it's above freezing you know when it slowly come above Freez uh or can preserve it so don't be fooled by appearances especially with cabbage cabbage can have some pretty nasty looking outer leaves but yeah pel back a couple and inside you might find a pretty good head okay so uh don't be put off by appearances uh do a little digging and you know understand that this is produce that's been out for months out in the field right so it's not going to be Supermarket quality because they'll call that stuff but it's perfectly edible perfectly safe as long as you follow standard practice and stay positive don't be hard on yourselves people don't Garden in the winter a lot for a reason uh it's not necessarily easy and there's if you get a nasty winter you know you're you might be out of luck if you end up having a light winter you could do particularly well so those things unless unless you control the weather in which case please come talk to me um if if you don't control the weather you can't control the weather and if you have a bad winter it's it's you know stay positive um look at it as an experiment right this is go into it as experiment and remember that negative results are still results if something didn't work one year well maybe try something else the next year um okay so infrastructure yay this is one of my favorites because you get to talk about stuff you can put in and on your garden um so we've already prepped our soil we picked good varieties so we're already you know started early enough in the year that they're all good uh eating harvesting quality or big enough at least to make it through for the spring so now talk about protecting so don't overuse infrastructure too much in the fall right so if I'm putting row covers on and getting everything nice and toasty in September October well then my plan they become weak right like I they might think oh this isn't September this isn't October this is oh August and you know September I'm going to put on lots of growth this is still early enough in the season and then when it gets really cold they're like oh why is it December all of a sudden so let them start to cold just like you uh harden off your spring plant outs you need to kind of harden off your winter plant outs let them get into cold uh if it's you know a light frost on your cabbage that's not going to kill them let them get that a couple of times to kind of start to acclimatize them and then as it starts getting colder then start adding these things to them to keep them uh to you're basically just trying to trim those extra cold temperatures off them rather than protect them uh like a helicopter Gardener uh the entire winter um and also be careful on Sunny mild days right you have a well this year what like what was it 75 on Christmas I don't remember but it was warm it was pretty warm so you don't want to have all these row covers on and then you have a rogue 6 ° day in December and then you bake all your plants uh my first winter where I overwintered a lot of cabbage I lost so much of my started cabbage for the next spring because it was a hot day and I forgot um and I ran out there in the evening I was like oh no and I pulled it up and it just smelled like melted cabbage uh cuz it all just wilted it was like too hot and it all died so uh make sure to ventilate and remove on those Rogue hot days which we're getting more of it seems like um also you want to avoid another warning avoid cross ventilation so when we look at row covers which are long kind of tubes if you keep both ends open uh you might get a wind passing through there and that's just going to suck the heat right out um you want to keep um ventilation slow and seeping rather than blowing uh or moving quickly cuz that pulls too much um heat or even uh uh coolness away from the plants and don't forget to water they're still alive right so they still need to be watered um and when you have an impermeable cover I'll show some row covers that are plastic um you'll need to water under them especially on a warmer day where it's fine to be opening them up um the bigger the cover uh the better it needs to be secured Against the Wind I was 2 miles north of that tornado you know or I mean why should I be surprised it's February there should be tornadoes um but you want to have everything maybe not against the tornado because what can you do uh but you want to have those you know Winter Winds are pretty brutal so make sure that they are well secured um and remember that everything that admits light also loses Heat at night through radiation so if you have a lot of clear stuff to get that that extra little light uh into your plants make sure that you also are covering it back up at night with something that insulates a little bit to keep that in all right so let's talk about some specific things aouch uh these were there were millions of these around Paris uh at the turn of the last century and they would uh these are tiny little bell shaped covers that go on in individual plants or in groups of small plants so if you can if you can afford these antique beautiful glass do do some folks have these a couple no they're harder to find and they're expensive um but you know what I have a lot of these um and you can make and these are nice because they have a little bit of ventilation built in um uh you can make them out of basically anything and these are just little bells that will keep a little extra heat and now these of course will be propped open uh on hot days they have clch uh uh you can just put like a little piece of wood tip them up um just so they get a little bit more ventilation on hot days so that they don't fry in there um you can use cones I've even seen people use those old like uh dog cones from when after the dog has a surgery I've seen them people use those things I don't know why you'd have a lot of those but maybe you're a veterinarian I don't know uh these are Dutch lights Dutch lights are temporary wooden frames and they support glass panes um they're higher in the north I mean this is a double pane um they're higher in the north generally and lower on the South Side um they can be DIY and this isn't something that's going to keep you know 20 below uh cabbage alive because it's glass but it will give you a couple weeks or maybe even a month or two uh on the shoulder Seasons um and you know these can be made from uh uh storm windows things like that you know if you have a friend in the trades um I have a friend in the trades and he's constantly texting me do you need more storm windows I'm like no please stop asking me I have a thousand and a half of them so uh with the caveat though it's glass and I always warn you anytime you put something glass in your garden there's a reasonable chance it's going to get broken and you might have to be dealing with glass shards in your garden so just buy or beware on that if you have the money for plexiglass or something like that go for it um but for my uh let's say very cost effective gardening uh AKA cheap uh those glass panes are pretty pretty uh effective cold frames the uh more grown-up cover uh cousin of uh Dutch lights uh you can DIY these with storm windows or full windows hinge along one side to create an A-frame uh or you can do it where you're building the sides out of another material you can do it out of um straw bales you can do boxes like this you can build little tiny green houses these are all could be classified as cold frames right these are built into the side of a house which is great it's getting all of this thermal Mass that's storing heat energy during the day also it's shared with the house so so it's you know radiating a bit of heat and then here are some yeah these are cement cement on the back to absorb heat and release it at night um those look like permanent uh built-in ones yeah so you can um go nuts uh but they should hug the ground the higher they are the more the heat can rise away from the plants you really only want them high enough to cover the plants uh for your best performance hot beds hot beds are artificially warmed soil on a bed of compost and these have kind of fallen out of favor in industrial production back in the day so this is a picture from France um they used to do uh hot beds all the time because they didn't have ready access to say natural gas to heat up a greenhouse which is what we do now uh because we would just rather burn the fossil fuel rather than use you know all this horse manure that's just going to waste uh back then there were a lot more horses there's a lot more horse manure um but they would pile up 18 or so inches of horse manure uh at the beginning and it would be semi anerobic so it would be slow to compost but you don't want 160° underneath your plant they'll burn them um but hot beds are essentially a layer of soil laid on top of a container of manure thick layer of composting manure uh so you could do 12 to 14 in for beds um that are going to last through the winter or maybe a little more depending on your um locations you can also build them above ground but then there's less insulation you can lose a lot of heat out of the sides um some people do their starts on compost beds that that's certainly a useful way to do it uh a second use of compost cuz it has all heat here we have one that's surrounded by straw and then inside is the manure um it's got covers on it so these are all useful ways to do a hot bed um you want to make sure you have a good layer of soil because if you're using manure it's going to have potential for bacterial transmission to leafy greens especially if you're eating leafy greens in a more raw State you might not want to do that from a hot bed just out of an abundance of caution my lawyers tell me I have to say that what you do in your own house is up to you but I'm telling you do not eat leafy greens from a hot bed because you might get eat coli I've said it now you do it and you get sick it's on you okay good we're all clear my lawyer's happy my my my wife's she's like be careful what you say you're telling people to do no no I'm careful okay um yeah plants need to be watered think about this there are extra heat in there so they're going to need a little more water than you think water around midday on a warm day um you can combine these of course as pictured here with cold frames Dutch lights row covers Etc you can even make a custombuilt greenhouse and I'll show you at the end here a custombuilt greenhouse um to hold these row covers this is a pretty good and approachable way to extend your season row covers uh also called Horticultural fleece egg fabric Etc there's a lot of different names for these you can find them in grower catalogs uh they're not as common in household gardening cataloges but they should be um these row covers are a lifer I use tons of them uh here are some of mine for example one of the first years I did this um I used bent uh that's EMT electrical medical met metal conduit uh bent into Horseshoes and then put over cabbages and things and lots of weeds apparently this is my first year doing it um and then I cover them up here um with multiple layers of this Fabric and they lived all winter long they made it through pretty easily um and you can adjust them I this was one brain uh storm I had of doing so you can see piled up Mulch on the back to blow uh cold Northern winds off of it dark color and then I had open I would open them up in the morning when I go open up the chickens if it was going to be a reasonable temperature they get some sunlight and then I'd close them up at night and this is the the white fa it's it's like a Horticultural fleece or egg fabric it's what the is row covering um in for Market gardeners um it's yeah it's just like a kind of a fleecy white yeah yeah it's like a woven feeling yeah it's permeable it breathes um but slowly and then yeah I had um clear poly in front um and that worked really well the kale the kale uh did survived all winter and I was just harvesting all winter and this was it and this was it in the spring uh it survived pretty well um others you can use more permeable or more uh robust covers uh going into the winter this was just to kind of keep it alive through the winter um worked really well so yeah different different ways uh so this is a good diagram to kind of show what I'm doing um different ways to do it uh so they're using those hor shoes uh to also keep as a wind barrier right to keep the wind from blowing the Horticultural fleece away um they sell clips that fit right onto half in EMT um some people use PVC I recommend I I think the PVC becomes too brittle um even if it's bent already once it gets to 20 below and then gets hit by a hard wind they can shatter I haven't had that happen to my EMT I don't want to I don't want to be in the winter storm that crushes my uh metal conduit uh that would be pretty nasty uh yeah so they use these kind of Clips but you can also buy little plastic clips that hold on uh special made for that um you could do a couple of layers you could do uh one layer here and then put more a slightly larger piping and then another layer then you'd get an air layer between them that'd be really good uh yeah so row covers are great poly tunnels are also nice and these don't have to be a big high hoop house that you invest in these can be you can just get um what's it called uh it is the tension wire for uh so if you go to Menards or any other store that sells chain link fence there's something called tension wire it comes in these big spools and it's pretty big gauge galvanized wire and then you can just cut through it and then bend them out and then you have these pretty strong enough Hoops of galvanized wire that you can then use like this to make little hoop houses and then you can get um different types of plastic through uh egg suppliers for Market gardeners or things like that and then you can make these small poly tunnels and you don't have to go nuts like this is a market Gardener right that's their job this is a I'm not suggesting that that you all go do this this winter but you can do it on a small scale you can make a small one um uh to keep things going a little longer and then you can add on to that right these it doesn't have to be just one thing so you can have this during the day and then you pull a row cover cover over it at night um so it does take more work but you can certainly get a lot out of it and if it's not getting sunny you don't have to uncover them and just leave them be uh walls and Terraces this is a bit more of a infrastructure if you want to go for it um but you know if this was facing the South this would be a really warm growing environment and you could build little covers and stuff into these uh infrastructure things so just just part of the built environment of your garden uh green houses now obviously a greenhouse is quite an investment this is my Greenhouse uh no I'm kidding uh this is the uh called the jewelbox it's in St Louis it was built for the 1904 World's Fair so that they could bring up all kinds of uh uh tropical plants and things um my wife and I actually got married in that um we saved a ton on buying flowers it's full of PL um and it's beautiful uh so uh they were actually invented in Roman times uh Emperor Tiberius needed cucumbers for medical reasons uh uh and plyy the Elder talks about how they created a greenhouse to grow cucumbers in Rome uh uh quite a long time ago uh the 1200s in the Vatican they kept getting gifts from across Christendom and so they built the greenhouse 1400s Korea they built um green houses with heated wooden or heated andle uh Stone floors that they'd light a fire and it would pass the smoke through the floor and it would heat up really cool uh but they weren't really widespread um outside of royal or very wealthy um environments until 1600s in Europe uh for Market Gardens and uh and so it's a big investment and these are obviously commercial like for Market gardeners or folks who are doing this as their job um but you can get pretty small uh economical uh green houses and even in the green houses I still have to cover my plant right um but I get an extra month on either side side of the growing season real easy um and yeah it it adds then I only have a couple of months that I need to Gap with extra measures inside and there are things you can do like uh insulation um plastic glazing isn't a real good insulator even though my high tunnel will get up to like the 70s when it's even like 35 degrees outside uh at night it gets down just as cold as everything else because all that heat gets lost is radiation so if I covered it uh it would keep a lot of that in uh you can have a double wall active blower this is a bit of an expensive thing where you have two layers of plastic and there's a blower keeping an air pocket in there that provides quite a lot of insulation um you can add thermal walls so these are big black um container big black metal containers full of water on the southern excuse me Northern wall of uh more climate control control Greenhouse but these absorb solar radiation all day and then at night they release that heat back and they will just really if the temperatures are going like this you know uh it will just kind of smooth them out a bit um you can do a manure comp composting and I'm going to get I'm going to show you this one later on but basically this whole back Northern wall these are each one of these is a cubic yard uh container for horse manure and that's producing a lot of heat that is then circulating through blowers into this it's a really cool Greenhouse I'll show you that in a bit um then there's things like active heating so this is a mass heater that all uh you fire it here and then all the smoke goes through all of this mat masonry before it leaves and that deposits a lot of the heat so the the temperature coming out of here is like 120° so that means all those BTUs are staying in the greenhouse uh you could do something like an earth tube the Earth stays constant uh if you get down far enough and if you have a long enough pipe and a blower you can be blowing 55 degree air in uh for the cost of just running a blower motor uh all winter long uh grow IND doors again I'm not really going to get too deep into this but if you're already heating your house which most of us do um you could be gardening in there or you could be growing something or at least keeping things alive I have a lot of stuff in my my root cellar that I bring in like figs um I keep my Citrus and my Southern windows are basically choca block with plants right now uh Citrus and things like that um you could also do things like micro greens uh for a lot of the same green nutritional stuff especially if you're saving your own seeds you have a surplus of seeds that you can eat um potted plants yeah keep those Southern Windows full I'm not going to get into like real hydroponic or anything where you're starting and keeping it inside forever but these there's a lot of really uh pretty options out there uh that are nicer than what I have well they're getting nicer cuz my wife says can you make this look a little nicer I like all the green but I don't want to feel like I'm living outside all right so now let's turn let's see what what time have I done I got okay good so I'll get through a couple case studies and we'll have time for questions or discussions maybe folks here have some other suggestions uh so these are case studies these are more like H kind of inspiration rather than uh go out and do it right now uh unless you want to which would be really cool let me know if you do cuz I'd love to share uh what you do anyway so uh so these are Chinese green houses these were developed in the 1980s um and these have had various iterations over the years but basically they're all kind of the same idea they have a masonry or a soil rammed Earth back Northern wall that absorbs heat during the day I guess these more so and then they have this kind of half an arch going forward and then what these look like are uh they're they're large and they grow tons of green leafy vegetables all winter uh for cities in China um there's uh yeah they have these they mass-produce these Arch lattice covers uh and then they're covered with uh F uh what do you call it uh Greenhouse uh film and then at night they have rice straw mats because that's what they have available but you could use any sort of matting or uh I use tarps a couple of tarps uh layered together on mine which I'll show you in a minute um oops whoa uh and they build yeah they have the infrastructure built up and then they just add the per perishable stuff and then you can you know grow Vining stuff on the back wall and quite a lot because these trellis roofs uh can take you know strings attached to them so you can do tomatoes in the summer yeah so it's a it's an interesting variation on a greenhouse if you're building a greenhouse and you're interested in turning it into a Four Season Greenhouse having that back wall it's not like you're getting the sun through the northern wall anyway um this is a really interesting uh adaptation that might not be significantly depending on how handy you are uh how significantly more expensive you could also build a greenhouse of that same configuration with the drums on the backside instead of the masonry it would do the same thing um so yeah there's again this will be on the website so you can find these resources but if you Google for a Chinese Greenhouse uh the University of Minnesota actually has grants for Growers to build them in in sorry in Minnesota so if you're if you happen to be a market Gardener from Minnesota you can check that out um but yeah there's a lot of really cool uh resources for that so this is mine um I built this this few years ago is a walipini which is an inground Greenhouse mine's semi INR I had to dig it out to make it in the ground but it is built of Earth bags which are uh grain bags spent grain bags from like uh Hop House and Wisconsin Brewing Company uh that I filled with a mixture of clay straw um lime and uh wood chips and then packed kind of like a retaining wall to go as to hold up the interior so this is the trench where the wall would go and then I I built that all the way up as you can see here and here's the roof being put on um and it is supposed to absorb the sunlight in the winter onto that back wall and then it would be a Four Season Greenhouse in the ground I'd change the roof I do some alterations on this but um but here it is in the spring and here it is here's the back side of it with a thermal mass and windows there uh because I got tired of doing and so here is an unheated so some Winters I heat it I'll show you how and other Winters I don't so this is the temperature graph from uh last year's February to this year's or I guess last so this is last winter this is not this winter so here is freezing about here so it does dip below freezing but it doesn't here's 23° so it never got below 23° that was the coldest it got in there that was with no heat um with no artificial heat and I Do cover it I've got a rolling cover uh so it opens up to get some sun in the winter and then it goes back down um I do have a mass heater in there um so this is when it's running um I and I just burned scrapwood in there so it's not like I'm buying in uh wood to burn in there and it doesn't burn much I just keep it above freezing um I even have like a a sensor in there as you can see because I have the data and it pings my phone if it gets down to 36 degrees I go out there I start a fire and it's fine for the night uh even like even well below zero it's perfectly fine and I have and I would start these plants outside and then bring them in um and I can start things in here really early so a bit more infrastructure but you know this is just kind of case study just to give you some ideas of what what's out there you can find a whole video with I apologize really annoying music uh on on YouTube or on our website lotex it.org I do apologize for the music just please turn it down um you can see me almost lose an eye uh Plastering it okay orange is in Kansas this is a really uh neat guy and he builds these green houses and sells kits and he grows Citrus in in for sale in can um and he digs these things deep into the ground and he sells kits called Greenhouse in the snow so you can Google Greenhouse in the snow and they'll come up um but yeah kits and you can build them however long you want however big you want um and yeah so he's growing oranges and lemons all winter long uh really beautiful interior uh you know if you wanted to get something off the shelf there's the Shelf uh the N uh new Alchemy Institute was uh kind of like what I aspire to be they had a whole bunch of of researchers working in the 1970s on things like Hydroponics and really ahead of their time agricultural research uh this was like during the oil crisis uh that I heard happened in the 70s I wasn't there yet um or aware of gas um and so these are bios shelters that they designed and built and so these are houses on the North side and then on the southern side they have large absorbent windows with a basically a a working ecosystem they've got water uh with fish and all kinds of plants and animals living in the water and grow beds and they're all interconnected um there's some really great videos uh on YouTube um that uh that you could check out that show them working and so this is when they were being built in like the 70s how they were getting installed and this is one still functioning today they built one on um Prince Edward Island in Canada and it was a passively heated uh Arc in in PEI oh here it is um and this was like running just on solar heat in Prince Edward Island which isn't the coldest part of Canada but it's still plenty cold um yeah so you can check that out Cape Cod Arc um you can't see the video it didn't capture when I tried to screen grab it but if you go to Cape card arc on YouTube there's a a a walkth through of it it's really cool um yeah and this is the compost greenhous this was actually the inspiration for a compost study that I did this last year um it is a greenhouse with Baye for HSE manure in the back and then there's blowers uh it's an air rated static pilot so you never have to turn this combos it blows uh fresh air through the compost and or through the horse manure and composts it without any turning and then it takes the carbon dioxide heat and moisture and pushes it into grow beds to make the grow beds warm uh yeah really uh great and so what I tried to do with my study uh was to make this modular so Market gardeners could put it in in the winter and then take it out uh unfortunately I think you don't have enough control over the variables you need to build a custom built one but it's pretty cool um if you have access to Horsemen go for it um yeah so here it is from the side you can see the horse manure there's a blower to blow CO2 the plants love the CO2 and then the heat rises up into this bed the heat gets blown into this bed and then the um the H2O the CO2 get blown through corrugated uh tube up through a wood chip bed which has a lot of beneficial bacteria to convert all the any nitrites uh into nitrates or the vice versa uh and then that goes into the plants uh yeah it's really clever and they got tons of uh winter vegetable winter leafy greens they were actually getting growth put on um in that uh but most people can't expect that so this is what we built this was a bladder that would capture all that moisture and send it through a grow bread but it wasn't working I did get good compost I have tons of good compost out of this but this was our bladder system that we built but I'm not going to get too deep into it because it was a negative uh or negative results are still results all right so that's the end of what I have uh but I'm very happy to entertain questions or comments what's been working for you uh growing in the winter so thank you very [Applause] much all right any questions yes that's true horses have uh yeah horses have uh less complete digestion and so yeah there you do get more pass through of seeds and things like that but there's more to compost uh it composts really well because it has a lot more let me ref so you want for composting you want a 30 to1 or 25 to1 nitrogen and carbon ratio right horse manure with bedding is almost perfect it's it's 25 to1 as you scoop it out of the stable and so you can throw it right in the bin it's really it's really nice that way if you're if it's straw bedding as as if it's wood chip bedding it's a little off but horse man or cow manure then you have to add a lot of nitrogen to it excuse me you have to add a lot of carbon to it because it's more nitrogen concentrated so perfectly fine to use horse manure or uh cow manure basically whatever you have access to is what you should use um yeah there's handouts up here if you want to grab any on the way out don't be shy other questions spokes are yeah so good question uh let the soil itself be your guy the question was how often should you be watering in the winter and it's really dependent because weather's more variable and the water needs are more variable in the winter so use your fingers uh into the soil and see is it damp you can probably wait if it's dry water yeah that's basically it especially again do it on a warm sunny nice day yeah other question question I look around no you're fine you're fine I'm sorry I didn't mean to make you duck yeah talking you know when you're throwing yeah the you said the you're talking soil temperature not it's covered right so the bed temperature yeah you preferably you keep your soil from freezing right because then it can continue uh biological activity Frozen some plants can survive with frozen ground but if you can keep it from freezing that's idea that's better um yeah but a lot of plants can deal with cold air temperatures but if their Roots freeze they die but if they're air temp yeah like cabbage is fine if the ground if the air freezes yeah yeah that's all right question back there - 20 night uh uh depends I mean yeah I mean you're going to have to experiment what works for your place uh for me for me to get through -20 and are we talking just like at night it's -20 then it warms up or are we talking like 3 days -20 because these are all different things it's all variable but you know the the more mulch if if it's going to be really cold I might like shovel snow on top of it cuz that's insulative too you know like and usually there's snow there when it's -20 and I would shovel it on if it's light snow or maybe I would get some uh you know extra tarps and put it over just anything to keep or spread straw over it and then cover it I mean whatever you can do but then I forgot to mention straw and other mulches also can Harbor uh mice and things like that so you might even think about M mouse traps CU I've certainly had Mouse eaten cabbage and stuff like that and then I put mouse traps in there so yeah yeah thank other question comments concerns yeah just mouse traps usually or garter snakes I'm just kidding they don't they don't live in the winter but yeah Mouse I I'm not against using uh you know some people will put out the pellets that they eat that that works perfectly fine I use the mouse traps cuz I like to feed the mice to my chickens same thing uh traps yeah uh but yeah pellets I will use I if if it's getting real bad I'll use chemicals but I try not to peanut butter is what I usually use I haven't had to trap for vs uh but I know other people use mouse trap and Vol traps with a lot of success but yeah for me for mice it's always peanut butter cuz it sticks on there it works real well for me straw bales uh-huh vs love straw it's a yeah I like straw for my potatoes but then the vs get in it and they destroy my potatoes so the potatoes produce tubers but then the the Vols eat them so all right thanks guys and that's where we wrapped up next time we'll be back in cooksville in the year 2100 looking at compressed air stay tuned that's it for this week the lowtech podcast is put out by the lowtech technology Institute this show is hosted and produced by me Scott Johnson the episode was recorded in the low Tech recording booth in cooksville Wisconsin subscribe to the podcast on iTunes Spotify Google play YouTube and elsewhere we hope you enjoyed the free podcast if you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do please consider going to patreon.com Institute and signing up thanks to our Forester and land Steward level members the hes for their support the low technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members grants and underwriting you can find out more information about the low technology Institute membership and underwriting at of course lch institute.org find us on social media you can reach me directly I'm Scott lch institute.org our intro music was first snow off the album winter Loi from hna that song is in the public domain and this podcast is under the Creative Commons attribution and share like license meaning you're free to use it and share it as long as you give us credit thanks so much for listening and take [Music] care