Cooking Greens in November

Cooking Greens to Harvest in Central Virginia in November

Beet greens – we get our last chance for greens as we harvest all our beets for storage. Sometimes the greens are in too poor shape to eat. Beets are hardy down to 15-20°F (–7 to –9.5°C) outside without rowcover.

There’s also cabbage, chard, Chinese cabbage (perhaps), collards, kale, komatsuna, senposai, , spinach, tatsoi, and Yukina savoy. Eat-All Greens harvests can continue, if you sowed some in September. When we sowed some on September 16, we got several harvests in November.

From the hoophouse we continue harvesting spinach, tatsoi thinnings and leaves, as well as leaves of Tokyo Bekana and Maruba Santoh. We can start to harvest chard, senposai, Yukina Savoy leaves and perhaps kale, although it is a slow grower.

At the end of November we keep a close eye on the Tokyo Bekana and Maruba Santoh, for signs of bolting. Normally these will bolt in December, so we harvest the whole plants that month. But we have sometimes needed to terminate the plants November 26 or so.

Cooking Greens to Sow in Central Virginia in November

Outdoors

we sow spinach (for spring harvesting) in early November if we have not been able to do it already.  Hopefully we will have got this done during October. Here it’s too late for any more outdoor sowings till spring, although there will be garlic planting.

In the hoophouse

on November 9 we sow spinach #3 to fill any spinach casualties that happen during the winter, and “Frills“ #2 (mizuna, Ruby Streaks, Scarlet Frills, Golden Frills). This is one of our favorite winter crops to suppress nematodes. We sow tatsoi #2 on November 15. We could sow Eat-All Greens in hoophouse in November, but so far we haven’t tried that.

No Cooking Greens to Transplant in Central Virginia in November!

Other Cooking Greens Tasks in Central Virginia in November

While watching the temperature forecasts, we continue to harvest the hardier greens, such as chard, yukina savoy, collards, kale, spinach and tatsoi.

As night temperatures drop, we clear some crops

In this order:

25°F (–4°C) Most broccoli, some cabbage, Chinese Napa cabbage, Maruba Santoh, mizuna, most pak choy, Tokyo Bekana.

22°F (–6°C): Bright Lights chard.

20°F (–7°C): Less-hardy beets, broccoli heads (some may be OK to 15°F/-9°C), Brussels sprouts, some cabbages (the insides may still be good even if the outer leaves are damaged),  cauliflower, most turnips.

15°F (–9.5°C): The more hardy beet varieties and their greens, some broccoli, some cabbage, red chard (green chard is hardy to 12°F (-11°C)),  Russian kales, rutabagas if not covered, turnip leaves, most covered turnips.

Each winter I update my Winter-kill Temperatures of Cold-Hardy Vegetables. This year I’m watching the Koji carefully, to get some good data.

Killing temperatures outdoors

Here are some more numbers for killing temperatures outdoors (without rowcover unless otherwise stated). In my Cooking Greens in October post, I gave the Veggie Deaths in the  35°F (2°C) to 15°F (–9.5°C) range. Here’s the next installment, which I am prompted to post by the forecast 16°F (-9°C) here for the night of Friday November 8. This list only includes the cooking greens. Your results may vary!  Let me know!  Click the link above to see the complete list.

12°F (-11°C): Some beets (Cylindra,), some broccoli, Brussels sprouts, some cabbage (January King, Savoy types), most collards, covered rutabagas (swedes), some turnips (Purple Top).

10°F (-12°C): Covered beets, Purple Sprouting broccoli for spring harvest (too cold here for us to grow that), a few cabbages (Deadon), chard (green chard is hardier than multi-colored types), some collards (Morris Heading can survive at least one night at 10°F/-12°C), probably Komatsuna; Senposai leaves (the core of the plant may survive 8°F/-13°C), large leaves of savoyed spinach (more hardy than smooth-leafed varieties), Tatsoi, Yukina Savoy.

5°F (-15°C): some kale (Winterbor, Westland Winter), smaller leaves of savoyed spinach and broad leaf sorrel. Many of the Even’ Star Ice Bred greens varieties are hardy down to 6°F (-14°C).

0°F (-18°C): some collards (Blue Max, Winner), Even’ Star Ice-Bred Smooth Leaf  kale, some spinach (Bloomsdale Long Standing, Bloomsdale Savoy, Olympia).

 Reminder: The temperatures given are air temperatures that kill those outdoor unprotected crops.

Overwintering chard

To keep chard in good condition overwinter, either cover with hoops and rowcover (in milder areas, Zone 6 or warmer), or else mulch heavily right over the top of the plant, after cutting off the leaves in early winter.

Covering spinach

Once the frost has killed the galinsoga we go ahead and put rowcover over the spinach beds. That happened this weekend (November 2 and 3) – we got temperatures of 27°F (–3°C) and 25°F (–4°C). Spinach will make growth whenever the temperature is 40°F (5°C) or more, which happens a lot more often under rowcover than exposed to the elements. We don’t want to provide rowcover for the galinsoga!

Special Cooking Greens Topic for November: Seed Inventory

November is a good month for us to start our big winter planning process. For all the crops, not just cooking greens! The first step is the Seed Inventory, in preparation for ordering the right amounts of the right varieties of seeds for next year. We do ours fairly accurately, because we also use the process to fine tune the amount of seed  to buy for each row we plan to sow. Some growers simply buy plenty and throw away all the leftover seed each season, but for us the time spent paying attention to what we need is very worthwhile. See the Planning section in my book Sustainable Market Farming for step by step details on how we do it.

We use a spreadsheet and a cheap little digital scale (for the small amounts, up to 100g). Ours is an AWS-100. It’s not legal for trade, but we are not using it to weigh seeds for sale, just to give ourselves a good idea of what we have left. For large quantities, we use our business shipping scale.

We take a few seed buckets and the scale into a pleasant-temperature room, and take out a bundle of seed packets of a particular crop. First we weigh a packet at a time and write down the amount. The scale can be tared for the empty packet.

Seed Viability

Next we assess whether the seed will be viable next year. Storage conditions make a big difference, the best storage being cool, dark, dry and airtight. Make your own decisions based on how carefully you stored the seeds, the information on each packet about percentage germination when you bought it, and the economic importance to you of that particular crop.

We have a simplified chart:

• Year of purchase only: parsnips, parsley, salsify, scorzonera and the even rarer sea kale;
• 2 years: corn, peas and beans of all kinds, onions, chives, okra, dandelion and
  martynia;
• 3 years: carrots, leeks, asparagus, turnips and rutabagas;
• 4 years: spinach, peppers, chard, pumpkins, squash, watermelons, basil, artichokes and cardoons;
• 5 years: most brassicas, beets, tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, muskmelons, celery, celeriac, lettuce, endive and chicory.

If the seed is still recent enough to grow well, we keep it. If it is too doubtful we “write it off” on the spreadsheet and consign the packet to a special “Old Seeds” bucket, which we keep for a year in case of mistakes or desperation!

This is the time we adjust the “seed rate” (seed/100′ or /30 m) column on our spreadsheet using our new information from our year.

After completing the inventory we have our annual Crop Review which we combine with popping garlic cloves for planting.