Winter

Vegetables

I’ve figured out how to get fresh locally grown vegetable in Northern Nevada! I can grow my own in a cold frame! The best part is these are vegetables I’d given up trying to grow in Nevada because of our unpredictable springs and incredibly hot summers.


The trick is to use protective covering such as a cold from or cool greenhouse. Right now I have kale, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cauliflower growing in an unheated greenhouse. I’m using grow boxes filled with potting soil set over a tray of water that is being wicked up through the bottom of the grow box. However, there is no need to spend the money to for a greenhouse and grow boxes if you want to try growing kale and other winter vegetables in Northern Nevada. A low to the ground cold frame and direct planting into the soil works just as well. The relatively warm air trapped in the cold frame will keep the ground from freezing solid.


I started my cool season vegetables in early fall in a seed tray in the greenhouse. If you want to start seeds now it’s best to start them indoors at a temperature of around 60°F. The seeds can be started in a shallow, well drained tray filled with moist but not soggy potting soil. In the presence of ideal germinating conditions the seeds should sprout in 4 to 7 days.
Let the sprouts put on at least one to two additional pairs of leaves before transplanting them into the cold frame or grow box in an unheated greenhouse.


Cold frames and unheated greenhouses only keep the temperature a few degrees above freezing so expect that these plants will be exposed to freezing conditions. However, they should still survive because they are tolerant of cold conditions. In fact these vegetables actually taste better if they do get a little bit frosted.


Once transplanted be sure to check soil moisture around the plants regularly because snow and rain outside will not necessarily translate into adequate soil moisture inside the cold frame. One discovery I’ve made, using the grow boxes, is that kale, broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts tend to consume less water in the winter than they did this past fall. There are two possible reasons for this; 1. They completed their most active growth during the fall, 2. The cold weather reduced the amount of water transpired through the leaves. This means watering requirements of winter grown vegetables is greatly reduced over summer water consumption.


In addition to reduce water consumption these plants need less fertilizer so be very sparing with any fertilizer applications. None may actually be better.

After the Frost

This past Saturday night we had a hard frost that burned all the roses and brought an end to my outdoor vegetable garden. The timing of this frost didn’t work well for showing off my garden to some out of town dinner guests the next afternoon. The roses were burned and the vegetables were limp. Luckily my garden is more than flowers or vegetables.
One of my gardening interests is using native grasses as ornamentals. Grasses, native and non-native, do well here in the Great Basin and they still look great after a hard frost. One of my dinner guests was admiring my ‘Little Bluestem’ (Schizachyrium scoparium) that was just outside my dining room window. The sun was at just the right angle to show off the bearded seeds still clinging to their stalks.
‘Little Bluestem’ is not native to the Great Basin but does well here if you water it a little. In spite of it being native to the Great Plains and Eastern United States where natural summer moisture is more plentiful it’s still relatively drought tolerant. Although it won’t survive here without summer watering it requires much less water than most lawn grasses and needs no fertilization. In fact the only maintenance I give my ‘Little Bluestem’ besides drip irrigation through the summer is I clip it back to the ground early each spring.
One reason it won’t survive in the Great Basin without summer watering is that it’s a warm season grass and doesn’t send out an inflorescence until later in the summer. This is unlike most of the native grasses in the Great Basin which are cool season grasses and send out their inflorescence in the spring. The reason most native grasses in Great Basin are cool season is that most of our moisture falls in the winter and early spring.
Many non-native plants that are very hardy to an area can pose a threat to the local ecosystem if they are too well adapted and escape cultivation only to out compete the native vegetation. The possibility that ‘Little Bluestem’ would escape cultivation in Great Basin is not likely to be long lived since it needs summer moisture to complete its life cycle and the likely of summer moisture in the wilds of Nevada is slim and none.

Erratic Weather in the Great Basin

Gardening in the Great Basin can be quite a challenge. Our weather is unpredictable and soils and water are salty but plants will grow here if they are salt tolerant, drought tolerant, and tolerant to both extremes of heat and cold.

This morning, October 10, 2008 was an example of how quickly and extremely weather in the Great Basin can change. Only a week ago we had sunny day summer-like weather but this morning I awoke to snow coming down very heavily. The ground was to warm for the snow to stay long but because it was coming down heavily it did accumulate briefly on the plants on my yard.

I took some pictures of snow on my roses and Maximilian’s Daisy because it was such an unusual event. The down side to this unusual and sudden weather change is that most woody plants aren’t ready and the water in their vascular systems may freeze and split some of the tissue.

The best way to reduce the occurrence bark splitting resulting from such fall freezes is to start reducing the frequency of irrigation on woody plants.

Though the sudden early snow storm and freezing temperatures could potentially damage some woody plants on the Great Basin one can only hope that many more storms will continue to come this winter and give us a good snowpack in our mountains so we will have water for next year’s growing season.