The first step to planting early, is to know what the normal time to plant is.  Makes sense, right?  Early is relative to each plant’s special needs.  An early eggplant crop may get planted after your 5th succession of salad greens are already in the ground.  Hopefully, the planting recommendations on our main learning center page will be a good starting point for this info, but it’s important to remember that each micro-climate is unique.  Generally, it’s pretty easy to push up the “safe” planting date by a couple weeks with a little extra effort and certain crops may be adaptable to techniques that can move even beyond that.  We’ll briefly touch on some of the things to consider when starting crops early:

Soil 

    Part of the challenge to early season gardening is just working the ground.  Having a light, sandy soil, or a soil high in organic matter will help a lot in making the soil workable early.  The old standby test is to form a ball of soil in your hand and bounce it on your palm.  It should start to crumble--if not, there is a real danger of doing season long damage to the soil by turning it into little adobe clods.  It’s just not worth it to work overly wet soil.  Try covering it with a tarp for awhile to see if it will warm and dry a bit.

    If you’re thinking far enough ahead, fork or till a spring bed the previous fall and mulch it with leaves or straw, rather than cover-cropping.  Next spring, it’s ready to plant!  The real, long term solution is to keep cover-cropping and adding compost each season.  Soil will be easier to work in the early season when it’s high in organic matter.  Another technique for cold, early season soil is ridge sowing.  Picture a empty garden with ridges and valleys in the soil--anywhere from 1”-6” tall.  Think about how the soil moisture would settle into the valleys, while the ridges are the first parts to dry out and warm up.  You can utilize this to your advantage if you need a little extra warmth.  Just hill up a little soil where you want your rows to be, and sow your seeds right along the top of the ridge.  It can also be helpful for transplanting certain crops that don’t like to be to wet at first like cukes, squash, basil, etc., but this technique is most often applied to crops that are direct sown in the early season.

Transplants

     Whether you grow your own, or use some of ours, garden starts are a great way to get a jump on the season in addition to the weeds and slugs.  Look for, or grow, starts that are vibrant and healthy, but if they are too lush and soft, you may need to “harden” them off by easing their transition to the garden.  Look for a place that will be a good half way climate for a couple days.  Maybe an enclosed porch, or outside for the days, but in the garage for a couple nights.  Anything that will prevent a sudden shock to their systems.

Protection

    Crop protection can come in many forms with varying degrees of effectiveness.  It can be as simple as planting under the south eve of the house or next to a rock wall. A nightly covering of vulnerable plants with simple yogurt container or water jug type “kitchen cloches” can also be very helpful.  Just remember to take them off each day if they’re not clear.  If they are clearish, they can be left on for rainy days, but when in doubt about the weather, pull them off.  A half hour of warm sun is a gift for a spring planting, but it can quickly scorch a seedling sealed in a small cloche. 

    Crop protection can also be more elaborate (and reliable)

with tools like cloches (pictured upper right), cold frames (pictured middle right), and floating row cover (pictured lower right).  It can also involve covering the soil with a black planting paper or landscape fabric and cutting planting holes in it.  This technique works best with long-standing, heat loving crops and isn’t recommended for things like spinach, etc.  With all of these, the goal is to collect some extra warmth during the day

and conserve it over night.  On small farms like ours, the most common option has

become floating row cover.  It can usually add 2-3 weeks to each end of the season for many crops.  Made of spun polypropylene, it can last for many uses with a little care.  Even after getting some holes in it, it still does a pretty good job.  Because it allows light, rain and air to pass through, it can stay on through all kinds of weather without being vented.  For many crops, it can just rest right on the plants, though those with sensitive growing tips (basil, peppers, etc.) can really benefit from wire “hoops” cut from 9 or 10 gauge galvanized wire to hold the fabric over the row.  It simply gets tucked into the soil alongside the bed.  Look for it at the Skagit Co-op or Peaceful Valley Farm Supply, and don’t forget to pull it off and do a little weeding occasionally. 

    A step up in protection is the venerable cold frame.  This term refers to any small, rigid structure covering a garden bed.  Window stores often times will give away old windows that have been removed from houses and these have been the starting point of many homemade cold frame designs.  If you’re considering this option, just avoid lead paint on the frames and protect from falling tree branches in the garden.  A way around these two concerns would be to use either corrugated or twinwall polycarbonate.  The twinwall is harder to come by, but it has the advantage of being double paned to conserve heat.  Both are unbreakable--which you can appreciate if you’ve ever picked glass shards out of a garden bed.  Just as with the water jug cloches mentioned earlier, make sure to vent these when the sun comes out.  There are even small, temp actuated arms that will open the top of the frame automatically if you want to get really fancy.  Check out Steuber Distributing in Snohomish, or Charlie’s Greenhouse in Mt. Vernon for these items.

    Cloches are also a great option.  There are a myriad of versions of the basic design, which is to form something into arches over the garden bed a few feet apart and cover it with clear plastic sheeting.  Of course remember to ventilate, like the others.  A couple of materials notes:  PVC and polyethylene react with each other, so if you choose to make your arches out of PVC, consider painting them to avoid degrading your sheeting.  Also, the sheeting should be 6 mil thick and ideally be greenhouse grade (UV stabilized), or else it will only last about one season.

Harvesting Late:

    Just as we can stretch what is normally seen as the beginning of gardening season forward, we can also push the end of harvest season back quite a ways.  There are a few different ways to achieve this:

Crop and varietal selection

    Probably the biggest factor in being able to lengthen the harvest season is simply choosing crops that will hold well into the fall and winter--in other words, learn to love kale, collards, brussel sprouts, parsnips, etc.  Really this isn’t “season extension” exactly, because these crops love the cool wet weather, but it does seem to fit the theme since it lengthens the

harvest season.  Steve Solomon talks about winter gardening a good deal in his book Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, and we will simply second his advice to reserve a substantial part of the garden for winter vegetables.  They can nicely fill in where your early salad greens or peas were, but think it through ahead of time, and you may want to hold out some of the garden space empty waiting for the fall-winter crops.  Of course, by empty we mean mulched or cover-cropped.  Because these plants are not actively growing during the winter, and the harvest period is so long, it can take a sizeable patch to support a household.  Our experience:  the best time to plant a lot of these items is in July.  You want to make sure they get well sized up before the real cold hits and they stop growing.

Crop protection

    Some hot season crops, like tomatoes, eggplant, peppers and basil, can really benefit from some end of the season protection.  These crops can be challenging in our region, and they’re so good that it’s worth a little extra effort to prolong the harvest.  Another way to think about it, is to assess the proportion of a crops harvest season that you are able to add.  In other words, lettuce has a very long harvest season, if you time your successions well, so extending by a few weeks is nice, but maybe only a 15% addition to the season.  Some seasons around here, the eggplant, pepper, tomato season may be only a few weeks long.  If you can extend that by a few more weeks, you’re getting an increase of 100% out of the same plants.  That’s a big difference. 

    Many of the same techniques described earlier will offer protection in the late season as well, but there are a couple of new issues to take into account.  First, the plants are a lot bigger, so your yogurt containers aren’t going to do much good, and your cold frame may not even be able to close anymore.  Second, air circulation is more important now because the plants are more apt to be hit with various fungal diseases this time of year.  Floating row cover can still be a helpful option, but it doesn’t help for protecting against the late season rains that bring blight to the tomato patch.  The only real solution for tomatoes is putting up a makeshift, clear plastic cover over the patch in early September, and making sure to keep up with your pruning to provide air circulation.  We’ll add a whole page about tomato growing soon since there’s so much to say on the subject.  For peppers and the other hot season crops, it can be sufficient to just drape a tarp over the plants on cool fall night, if you can’t create a temporary cloche for them.

    While we focused here on the heat lovers that can be a challenge in the Northwest, many other crops can be encourage to thrive further into the Fall with a little extra care and some row cover.  If you’re new to the area, remember this word: Northeaster.  If you hear people saying that the northeaster is coming, even your winterbor kale will benefit from a tarp covering for a little while.

Storage

    Again, many people wouldn’t exactly consider this garden season extension, but harvest storage is one of our great joys, and is crucial to feeding yourself well from the garden (see the picture of a nice December meal in the making below).  Check out the books Putting Food By, and Stocking Up for all kind of info about canning and drying and freezing.  Just a couple of thoughts from our experience: 

    Aside from things that are preserved in some way (canning, etc.), we separate our storage veggies into two, broad categories--things that like to be stored cool and dry, and things that like to be stored cool and damp.  The cool and dry group includes things like onions, garlic, shallots, winter squash, while the cool and moist includes cabbage, potatoes, parsnips, beets, carrots, etc.  In simplest terms, this means keep the cool and dry items in a cool part of the house in baskets or stacking crates so they can get good air circulation.  The cool and moist items would rather be in a well insulated, but nearly outdoor type of space, like a garage or damp basement.  These items can usually do pretty well just in boxes or plastic tubs.  You want to strike a balance between not getting too much air moving through them and drying them out, but a the same time, they shouldn’t be completely sealed up either.  Again, if the Northeaster is on its way, make sure anything in an unheated space is going to be o.k.  An extra blanket on top of the boxes for a week can save a lot of food from being ruined.

If you have other questions about season extension, feel free to stop by the booth at the market, or drop us an email.