Cold Weather Harvest

The time has come! We finally are able to harvest some of our cold weather crops. We just got a whole bunch of spinach and other leafy goodness into the store.

This salad mix is probably the easiest thing to grow that I have had all year. Since they are growing in the cold weather, I really don’t have to worry much about bugs or disease that prefer the hot humid climates of summer. Aside from putting them in the ground and making sure they had enough water, I just had to pick, wash and eat!

We are still waiting on a few of the slow growers to start producing. Broccoli, Cauliflower, Pak Choi, and Flower Sprouts take a little bit longer to mature but, luckily for us, they are all very cold tolerant. Broccoli and Cauliflower can survive temperatures into the teens before they show signs of cold damage! The Pak Choi should be along very shortly… It’s looking great!

All the way over in the greenhouse, we are still trying to get some strawberries to produce a little bit earlier than their buddies out in the field. So far the cold hasn’t gotten to them yet and their blossoms look good.

Strawberries can survive very cold weather. Instead of dying off, like most crops do in the winter, they choose to go into dormancy; which is basically hibernation for a plant. They don’t use up as much water and don’t focus on growing. Then when the temperatures heat up, it’s off to the races and the blossoms come out again! The strawberries out in the field don’t have many blossoms. The blossoms that did make their way out were killed or damaged by the cold this week which isn’t a big deal. They will just go into dormancy and try again in the Spring, when we want them to. If we can keep it warm enough in the greenhouse over the winter, the blossoms in there won’t die and grow to produce big, juicy strawberries much earlier than normal! Just have to keep our fingers crossed...

You can tell when a strawberry blossom is damaged if the center of the blossom turns black. If it is yellow, that means it’s happy and healthy. Frost and cold damage won’t appear right away. Usually it takes a couple of days after a cold spell to actually see the damage. If it gets really cold (low teens) it could potentially damage the crown of the plant and affect new growth. That’s why if you drive by our field in late January/early February, you might see some white covers over the field. Those are essentially blankets for our strawberries. It traps heat and keeps the plants from being damaged by the cold. They won’t go on until we are actually trying to get them to come out of dormancy for the Spring.