Discouraged by deer raiding your garden? Hate weeding in hot weather? Local gardening communicator Niki Jabbour has a suggestion for you: start planting your food gardens year-round.
Jabbour is author of the recently released The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener, and feeds her family from the 200-square-foot garden she tends year-round at her home near Halifax.
This doesn’t mean we can go planting tomatoes outdoors in February, obviously. Jabbour says, "The key to enjoying a winter bumper crop is to grow the right vegetables at the right time and protect them with the right devices."
She further explains that if you grow produce that can handle some cold weather, like kale or spinach, they’ll do fine, but warm-season crops won’t prosper.
Do you need a greenhouse to grow winter crops in Nova Scotia? Jabbour says that although a walk-in greenhouse or tunnel is wonderful to have, it’s not required. None of her season-extenders are heated in any way, and they’re mostly made from inexpensive, recycled materials.
"Cold frames can be made from old windows, doors or even straw bales," she says. "You can even extend the season by weeks in spring or fall with cloches made from pop bottles or large juice containers."
If starting out with winter vegetable growing, Jabbour recommends very hardy and reliable crops like spinach, kale, leeks, winter carrots, and winter salad greens like mache and tatsoi.
Get a jump-start on spring’s cool-season crops like lettuce, mesclun, beets, broccoli and Swiss chard by sowing seed outdoors in cold frames in March, or under protective mini-tunnels.
Some of these may not be familiar to some gardeners, but Jabbour suggests, "Grow what you like to eat, but keep an open mind. My childhood vegetable garden certainly never grew tatsoi or mache, but my search for cold-season crops opened me up to a world of new flavours, and these hardy greens are now among my favourite veggies."
Want to encourage your children to eat their vegetables without being a nagging parent? Get them involved in the gardening process. Jabbour says her family fights over the seed catalogues in the spring and everyone gets a say in what’s grown in the garden.
There was a phase where one of her children would only eat purple vegetables, so the family planted a lot of purple veggies: beans, potatoes, radish, tomatoes, carrots, and more. She points out that kids love to harvest food, even in the dead of winter, and they’re thrilled to have their own small gardens to tend.
No matter what we plant, gardening isn’t without its challenges, and while there are no slugs or mosquitoes in winter gardening, there can be depredations from other wildlife. The deer have been problematic enough for Jabbour that she’s putting in an electric fence this year to handle the four-legged salad-munchers once and for all.
Although insects aren’t a problem in winter, they can be prevalent during the remaining garden months, but as Jabbour points out, most of the insects we see are the good guys.
"Learn to tell the good from the bad and you’ll save yourself a lot of stress!"
If you purchase Jabbour’s new book, The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener, you’ll find a host of tips and good advice on how to start growing vegetables year-round. Along with instructions on which crops do the best under what conditions, most of the vegetable-growing profiles include Niki’s Picks, which are her favourite crops according to the season. Arctic King is a good fall/winter butterhead lettuce, while Red Sails is better suited as a summer loose-leaf variety.
You’ll find a rich selection of seed choices from local seed companies, including Annapolis Seeds, Halifax Seed, Hope Seeds and Pumpkin Moon Seeds.