Planting Garlic and Garlic Scallions

Garlic scallions ready for harvest in early spring.
Photo Wren Vile

I have often written about garlic, and here I am going to focus on planting garlic. But before that, I want to encourage you to make the most of the opportunity to also plant a bonus crop: garlic scallions.

Garlic scallions are very little work,
They come with no extra cost,
They provide a very tasty and visually attractive crop.
They will be ready to harvest in the Hungry Gap, the early spring period before any new crops are ready to harvest, when our palates are tiring of stored roots and hardy leafy greens.
You may have run out of garlic bulbs and be craving that strong flavor to brighten your meals.
Ours are ready to harvest from March 10 until we run out or they are visibly bulbing up (April 30?).
If you are selling crops, garlic scallions can bring a big return for a small bunch, because most people will be happy with 3-6 garlic scallions.
Both garlic scallions and Garlic Scapes can extend your garlic sales season.

Garlic scallions prepared for sale. Typepad.com

The easiest time to plant garlic scallions is right after your main planting for garlic bulbs, in the fall. In preparation for planting your garlic cloves for bulbs, break apart the bulbs and sort the cloves. You won’t grow large bulbs of garlic from tiny cloves, so you’ll want to separate out the good ones for bulbs. Put the tiny cull cloves in small buckets and save them to grow garlic scallions. Much more productive than throwing them on the compost pile!

You can also plant for garlic scallions at other times of year. I don’t know what the limits are. You can certainly plant in a hoophouse later in the fall than you could plant outdoors. You can certainly plant softneck varieties outdoors for scallions in January (weather permitting) or February.

Some growers are finding they can get a better income from garlic scallions than from bulb garlic, and so they are working to extend the garlic scallion season.

As an alternative to planting small cloves, you can plant whole cull bulbs, and turn a misfortune into a windfall. I don’t mean bulbs with fungal infections, but bulbs that ended up too small to sell, or use at home. Plant the small bulbs at a wider spacing than tiny cloves, maybe 5″-6″ (12-15 cm) apart. You’ll grow ready-made bunches of garlic scallions!

Garlic scallions in February. Photo Pam Dawling

Planting Garlic Scallions

We plant small cloves for garlic scallions in early November immediately after planting our maincrop garlic.
We choose a small space that is easily accessible in late winter and early spring, where we often walk by.
We make 3″ (7.5 cm) deep furrows with a hoe, only about 2″ (5 cm) apart. A lot fits in a small space.
We tumble the small cloves into the furrows, any way up, shoulder to shoulder.
We close the furrows, tamp down the soil, and cover with a mulch of spoiled hay. Tree leaves or straw would also work.
Some growers have experimented with replanting small whole cull bulbs. This could be a good way to salvage value from a poorly-sized garlic harvest.
Softneck garlic varieties can make worthwhile growth for scallions even if planted January-March. By planting later than this, it is possible to stretch the harvest period out later.
Some growers find they can get a better income from garlic scallions than from bulb garlic.

Garlic scallions ready to harvest outdoors in late March. Think what might work in a hoophouse! Photo Pam Dawling

Harvesting Garlic Scallions

We harvest garlic scallions from early March until May. 3/10 to 5/15 or later in central Virginia

Once the plants are 7″–8″ (18–20 cm) tall
We simply loosen the plants with a digging fork (rather than just pulling) and lift the whole plants out of the ground.
We trim the roots, rinse, bundle, and set them in a small bucket with a little water.
Scallions can be sold in bunches of three to six depending on their size.
Some people cut the greens at 10″ (25 cm) tall and bunch them, allowing cuts to be made every two or three weeks.
We tried this, but prefer to harvest whole plants.
We grow a lot of bulb garlic and have a lot of tiny cloves available, hence a lot of garlic scallion plants.
Our springs are short and don’t really provide opportunity to make multiple harvests.
The leaves keep in better condition if still attached to the clove.
If you do have more than you can use fresh, they can be chopped and dried, or frozen for making pesto later in the year.

Harvesting garlic scapes in May
Photo by Wren Vile

Planting Garlic

Both hardneck and softneck garlic do best planted in the fall, though softneck garlic may also be planted in the very early spring if you have to (with reduced yields).
Plant when the soil temperature at 4″ (10 cm) deep is 50°F (10°C) at 9 am. If the fall is unusually warm, wait a week.
Cloves for planting should be from large (but not giant) bulbs and be in good condition. Bulbs should be separated into cloves 0–7 days before planting.
Planting deeper helps keep the garlic at a steadier temperature (milder during the winter, cooler once spring heats up)
When properly planted and mulched, garlic can withstand winter lows of -30°F (-35°C).
Garlic roots grow whenever the ground is not frozen, and the tops grow whenever the temperature is above 40°F (4.5°C).
If you miss the window for fall planting, ensure that your seed garlic gets 40 days at or below 40°F (4.5°C) in storage before spring planting, or the bulbs will not divide into separate cloves.
Plant garlic in cold areas with the goal of getting a good amount of root growth before winter has a firm grip, but not to make top growth until after the worst of the weather.
In warm areas, zones 7 and warmer, the goal is to get enough top growth in fall to get off to a roaring start in the spring, but not so much that the leaves cannot endure the winter.
If garlic gets frozen back to the ground in the winter, it can regrow and be fine. If it dies back twice in the winter, the yield will be lower than it might have been if you had been luckier with the weather.

Grey Duck Garlic has a helpful chart by USDA winter-hardiness zone. I’ve combined their information with that I gathered previously.
In zones 0-3, if no permafrost, plant garlic in September.
In zones 3b-5, plant late-September to early-October. Plant 2-3 weeks after the first frost but before the ground freezes solid for the winter. Another way of counting is 6 weeks before the ground freezes.
In zones 5-7, plant in the second half of October. If your area does not normally get seasonally frozen ground, you could plant later.
In zones 7-9, plant in early-mid November; up till late November in zone 9.
In zones 9 and 10, look for soil to be less than 85°F (29°C) at 2″ (5 cm) deep – garlic can be planted in December or even as late as February if you have vernalized the planting stock. (Vernalization for hardneck garlic = 6 weeks of cold temperature below 40-45°F/4-7°C; softneck is less demanding) Without sufficient vernalization, the bulbs will not differentiate (divide into separate cloves).
In zones 11-13, I think plant in January or February after vernalization – check with local growers or your Extension Service, as there’s very little info out there. Also see the section below on growing garlic in the tropics. See Grey Duck Farm’s Southern Garlic Grower’s Guide by Susan Fluegel
If planted too early, too much tender top growth happens before winter.
If planted too late, there will be inadequate root growth before the winter, and a lower survival rate as well as smaller bulbs.

Garlic beds next to rowcovered broccoli beds, under a stormy sky.
Photo Wren Vile

Garlic Growth Stages

Garlic and onions are biennial crops grown as annuals. They have 3 distinct phases of growth: vegetative, bulbing and blooming (bolting) The switch from one phase to the next is triggered by environmental factors. It is important to understand that it does not work to plant onions or garlic at a random date in the year.

Vegetative growth (roots and leaves). For large bulbs it is important to produce large healthy plants before the vegetative stage gives way to the bulbing stage. If planted in spring, garlic plants will be small when bulbing starts, and only small bulbs are possible.
Bulbing is initiated when the daylight reaches the critical number of hours. Garlic bulb initiation (and the end of leaf growth) is triggered by daylight increasing above 13 hours in length (April 10 here at 38°N). Soil temperatures over 60°F (15.5°C) and air temperatures above 68°F (20°C) are secondary triggers. The rate of bulbing is more rapid with high light intensity and increased temperature.
Flowering (Garlic scapes): Scapes are the hard central flower stems of hardneck garlic. Removing the scapes can increase the bulb size 25%, and also provides an additional food crop. In general, plant flowering is triggered by some combination of enough vernalization (chilling hours – maybe 10 weeks below 40°F/4.5°C), plant maturity, daylength and temperature. In cold weather the plants suppress the flowering signal. When the daylength and the temperature are both right, they trigger flowering.

Additional Stages:

Fattening up: Garlic can double in size in its last month of growth.

Drying down: Hot weather above 91°F (33°C) ends bulb growth and starts the drying down process.

Popping garlic for replanting at Twin Oaks.
Photo Bell Oaks

Cover Crops for November: Winter Rye and Austrian Winter Peas

Cover Crops for November: Winter Rye (with Austrian Winter Peas early in November)

Winter rye headed up. Mow or turn it under very soon! Don’t let it shed seed.
Photo Pam Dawling

The first half of November is the last chance to sow winter cover crops in central Virginia

Our average first frost is October 14-20. If yours is later, see my post Cover Crops for October. It is still worthwhile to sow a few cover crops up to three weeks past your average first frost, and I’ll tell you about those, with ideas on what to do if your climate is past that point.

If the area is ready for cover crops up to 10 days past the frost date, sow winter wheat or winter rye and hairy vetch or Austrian winter peas.

See Planning Winter Cover Crops, a post that includes my Short Simple Guide to Winter Cover Crops and my slideshow Cover Crops for Vegetable Growers.

Last Chance Cover Crops in November: Rye

Rye grows impressive roots that improve the soil. Kauffman Seeds

Winter rye can still be sown in the mid-Atlantic in the first half of November. Winter rye is the cereal grain rye, not ryegrass. Ryegrass comes in annual and perennial forms, but neither is a good winter cover crop here. They don’t produce as much biomass as cereal rye, and can become weeds in our climate.

Winter rye is hardier than any other cover crop and can take later planting dates. Some people do sow winter wheat in early November rather than winter rye, so if you don’t have rye seed, use wheat. It can be tricky to have the cover crop seed you want, without risking buying more than you need. Sometimes it pays to use what you already have, as it may not give good germination if saved over to next fall.

Winter rye has an allelopathic effect (inhibition of germination) on small seeds, that lasts three weeks or more after rye is turned under. This means you will need to be fairly confident that the weather will allow you to till the rye in with three weeks to go before sowing carrots, spinach or other spring crops with small seeds. Transplants are not affected in the same way. If necessary, reconfigure your crop rotation plan over the winter. Plan for the next food crops after winter rye to be ones planted after late April, such as late corn plantings, winter squash, transplanted watermelon, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, June-planted potatoes, fall brassicas, and second plantings of summer squash, cucumbers, beans.

A field of winter rye with a strip of crimson clover in early May.
Photo Bridget Aleshire

Other key features of winter rye cover crop

Rye grows 5′-7′ (1.5-2.1 m) tall.
Mow-kills at flowering, but not earlier.
Suppresses weeds (especially lambsquarters, redroot pigweed, ragweed).
Adds lots of organic matter if grown to full size.
Improves the soil’s ability to absorb and store water.
The roots hold the soil together and greatly reduce erosion.
Can be used to scavenge nutrients left over from a previous legume crop or to hold onto nutrients applied for a crop that failed.
Sow from 14 days before to 28 days after first fall frost.
Don’t sow before September in zone 7 – it may set seed.
Rye makes little growth in mid-winter, but very good growth once spring arrives.
Rye can be sown in the spring, although when incorporated, oats break down quicker.
Can be undersown in sweet corn or in fall brassicas in early September, and left as a winter cover crop.

Cover crop of rye and winter peas with flowering crimson clover. Photo Bridget Aleshire.

Include Austrian Winter Peas if possible in the first week of November

See my September post for more about the benefits of including legumes with winter cover crops grasses. Also how to inoculate legume seeds with the nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Austrian winter peas can be sown later than other legumes. See my October post for more about those. See Working with the time you have left for options if you are in another climate zone.

A key to success with legumes is to sow early enough in fall to establish before winter halts growth, and to plan not to need that plot next year until flowering time for that legume. Austrian winter peas bloom here at the end of April (about a week later than crimson clover, and a week earlier than hairy vetch). (If you have a legume that doesn’t reach flowering, you get less nitrogen for your money, and will need to add some compost or other source for the following food crop.) Suitable crops for following Austrian winter peas are ones planted after May 1: winter squash, melons, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, middle sowings of sweet corn, June-planted potatoes. This is pretty much the same list as crops that can be planted after winter rye.

Austrian winter peas
Photo https://www.uaex.edu

October 15 (our average frost date) is our clover/peas watershed (legume-shed?). Before that date we use crimson clover; after it (until 11/8, 3 weeks after our average frost date) we sow Austrian Winter Peas, along with winter rye or winter wheat.

Austrian winter peas winter-kill in zone 6, but are hardy in zone 7. Hardy to 0°F (-18°C). Sow Austrian winter peas at least 35 days before first hard freeze (25°F/-4°C) – in zone 7, that’s a 50% chance on 11/8. See Weatherspark.com for info on your location, or Dave’s Garden.

Last Chance cover crop

In the second week of November, we sow winter rye alone as our last chance cover crop. It is too late for any legumes.

Grain seed will store OK for the next year, but peas and beans really lose viability fast. If you still have Austrian winter pea seed from last year, I’d say throw it in this November rather than keep it for a third year, even if you are past the usual date. Germination rate goes down to 50% after a couple of years, and the plants won’t be sturdy.

Barbara Pleasant tells us two other ways cover crops can improve soil: Rhizodeposition and bio-drilling.

Rhizodeposition is a process whereby plants release sugars and other substances through their roots. The root tips host colonies of helpful microorganisms that go deeper as the roots grow deeper. For rye, this depth can reach 6 feet (2 m)!

Bio-drilling is what happens when cover crop roots “drill” into compacted subsoil. Oilseed and daikon radishes are cover crops famous for this action. The roots push deep into tight subsoil. Bio-drilling also happens when deeply rooted cover crops penetrate the subsoil and then die. With winter rye this can happen when the headed-up rye is mowed close to the ground in spring, or the rye is tilled into the top soil, severing the roots below till level. The next crop can follow the root channels made by the cover crop. This gives access to nutrients (including dead roots and microbes) left behind by the cover crop.

How to protect the soil over the winter if it is too late for cover crops

Carrot harvest cart. Our Danvers carrots have plenty of sturdy leaves to protect the soil over winter. Photo Mari Korsbrekke

Sowing cover crops too late means you don’t get enough growth in the fall, and the soil is not adequately protected from erosion or from weed growth over the winter. Try really hard not to leave bare soil over the winter.

If it’s too late to sow cover crops, but you do have a healthy growth of weeds, mow them at the beginning of November and then leave everything alone until early spring. The weed roots will hold the soil together and the above-ground growth will protect the soil from heavy rain. Having live plants will provide food for the microbial life in the soil.

If you don’t have weeds, but only almost bare soil, and it’s too late to sow cover crops, find some kind of organic mulch to cover the soil. When we harvest our storage carrots in November, we return the cut tops to the soil surface. Another seasonal option is tree leaves (sometimes conveniently left in bags by the curb). Best to ask the “owners” before lifting them. Other ideas include straw or hay. Woodchips or sawdust will work for winter protection, but don’t till them in when spring arrives. Rake them off and compost them nearby. If turned under, they use up a lot of nitrogen decomposing, and your crops will be starved.

More resources on cover crops

My book Sustainable Market Farming has a chapter on cover crops and many pages of charts about particular options.

Cover of Managing Cover Crops Profitably book from SARE

The book Managing Cover Crops Profitably (third edition) from the Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education Program (SARE), is the best book I know on the subject. You buy the book for $19 or download it as a free PDF from SARE.

Putting new plastic on the hoophouse (again)

Our hoophouse with its new inner plastic. Gabby Schulz

Putting new plastic on the hoophouse (again)

Our hoophouse has been up since 2003, and in these 20 years has had several replacements of the big roof plastic. We’ve replaced the end wall plastic less often, as it isn’t inflated and a few holes don’t matter. It’s true that old dirty plastic doesn’t let as much light in, but we are firmly on the side of not replacing end wall plastic and roof plastic in the same year.

I wrote Replacing Hoophouse Plastic in September 2017. Six years later, here we are again. This year we needed to replace all the baseboards, too, as the 2″ thick cedar had rotted, and for a few months a section of wigglewire channel holding the plastic had completely detached from the baseboard. We considered whether to buy cedar, metal baseboards or plastic lumber baseboards. I wrote about the pros and cons of each in May (2023). We ultimately decided to go with the “Hat Channel” metal baseboards from Tunnel Vision Hoops. We wanted something long-lasting at a fair price. We have a small concern about the metal baseboards lacking thermal insulation, compared to lumber, or even plastic lumber, but on balance it seemed like our best bet. No regrets, and Tunnel Vision Hoops were really helpful.

Our new hoophouse metal baseboards with wigglewire channel attached. Gabby Schulz

We removed the old plastic in the middle of September, after we had planted one bed with early crops. We continued bed prep and planting in the fresh air until October 11, when we got the new plastic on.

One bonus is that we got several inches of rain one day and decided it was enough that we didn’t need to do our twice-yearly salt wash-down. (Tweaking the Salt Wash-down Dates) and Preparing your Hoophouse for Fall and Winter.

It took us a long time to remove all the rotted baseboards. We started out undoing as many bolts as possible, but then a helpful colleague showed up with a power reciprocal saw and cut through all the remaining ones. We also had to remove all the crumbling old duct tape we had bandaged the metal connectors and bolt heads with. Just in time, one of the crew suggested we buy Gorilla tape instead. We were pretty unhappy about all the silver dandruff of micro-plastics from the duct tape landing on our soil. Gorilla tape is thicker, stickier, less flexible, and most importantly lasts a lot longer. We saw we had used a little of it last time, in 2017, and it was still good. We had also used some pewter-grey exterior duct tape in 2017, and it was still good too. No idea where we bought that.

Close up of new shadecloth hook in place in baseboard. Gabby Schulz

We had a hope to be ready for the new plastic on October 6, but we had to deal with our slightly nervous inexperience installing metal baseboards. By this point in the year, we had to watch the forecast not only for days without rain, but also one with calm winds (below 5 mph) and we had hit a breezy spell. Our average first frost is October 15 or so, and the nights started to get chilly. Juggling all these factors, we did really well and got the plastic on during the one day that week without winds above 5 mph. We also kept up with all the October bed prep and planting, which is intense. Yay, team!

I won’t repeat what I’ve said before (click the links). If you are launching on a similar recovering, study our step-by-step instructions. If not, simply enjoy the photos.

Hoophouse frame with silage tarp spread to unroll new plastic on. Gabby Schulz

Another new idea this year was to take a 25 x 100′ silage tarp that was handy, and spread it out along the south side of the hoophouse to unroll the new plastic on. Another is to lift the roll of new plastic by inserting hoe handles in the cardboard tube, lift, and have someone walk out the free end. Much easier than pushing the roll along the ground!

2017 photo throwing a water bottle over the hoophouse to help pull the plastic. Wren Vile

We really like to have 6-8 people, who we hand pick and invite. I have found out the hard way that being open to all volunteers leads to things going wrong. We also think 5 ropes is the minimum for this length of hoophouse. We plan to have 7 next time. We value having a spotter inside the hoophouse to push up on any jammed tennis balls, and a spotter on the south side (outside), who can see progress with the outer layer going up and call to individuals to pull more or pause, so that the plastic goes up evenly.

New inner plastic being pulled up and over the frame. Wren Vile

We had some trouble with the outer layer snagging, and speculated that it might be because our frame does not have a ridge pole, just two high purlins. The tennis ball lingered in the saggy bit of plastic too much. I also think we could practice smoother knots, to reduce the chance of snags.

We ordered 48′ x 100′ Tufflite IV and Tufflite IR and PolyPatch tape for our 30′ x 96′ gothic-shaped tunnel from Nolts Greenhouse Supplies in PA. We use the wigglewire and aluminum channels (also called Polylock), which are reusable over and over.

Bucket of tools for setting wigglewires. Gabby Schulz

Tool List:

Tall stepladder and 2 pairs of shorter stepladders
For a 30′ x 96′ tunnel, at least 8 rolls of high quality Gorilla tape. Stinginess doesn’t pay.
Tools for each person: pliers, soup spoon, flat-bladed screwdriver, scissors.
Utility knives to trim the plastic when it’s on right. Bolt cutters (for the wigglewire)
Tennis balls and ropes to pull the edge of the plastic over the top. At least 5 sets for a 96′ house. Use ropes long enough to go over to the other side – say 5′ longer than the width of your plastic.
A sock and a plastic water bottle (to attach to the throwing end of the rope)
Polypatch tape and scissors. Accidents will happen. Try to be gracious and forgiving!

Bed Prep continued alongside renovations. Notice taped frame connectors on left, not yet taped on right. Raen Thornberry

New Hoophouse Plastic Step-by-Step Instructions

Cover Crops for October: Winter Wheat and Austrian Winter Peas

Focus Cover Crops for October: Winter Wheat and Austrian Winter Peas

In August I wrote about cover crops such as millets, southern peas, buckwheat which are frost-killed. For most of us in the mid-Atlantic, it’s too late for those.

October is too late to sow winter-killed cover crops in central Virginia

Our average first frost is October 14-20. If yours is later, and you still have 40-60 days to your average first frost, you can still sow oats to winter-kill. If possible add a legume (soy and spring peas are easy, and will be killed by the frost, so they won’t complicate food crops next year). For us, the cut-off date for oats is September 15 if we really push it. Sowing too late means you don’t get enough growth in the fall, and the soil is not adequately protected from erosion or from weed growth.

Oats winterkill completely at 6°F (-17°C) or three nights at 20°F (-7°C. Fall-sown barley (Hordeum vulgare), grows even faster than oats, and dies at 17°F (-8°C).

There are still three weeks here when it is worthwhile to sow cover crops (up to a month past first frost), and I’m going to write about those here.

See Planning Winter Cover Crops, a post that includes my Short Simple Guide to Winter Cover Crops and my slideshow Cover Crops for Vegetable Growers. Oats, barley, wheat and rye sown too early can head up and seed before you get to winter, making them less useful, and more of a weed problem. Once we’ve reached mid-October, this is no longer an issue here.

Winter rye cover crop headed up in early May.
Photo Pam Dawling

Winter-hardy grass cover crops to sow in October

Winter rye and winter wheat can be sown in the mid-Atlantic in October. Wheat has less of an allelopathic effect on small seeds, the inhibition of germination that lasts three weeks after rye is turned under. Wheat doesn’t produce as much biomass as rye, so there’s the tradeoff. We sow wheat if the area is ready for cover crops 20-40 days before frost, allowing us to make faster use of those plots in the spring, compared to plots sown to rye.

Winter wheat prevents erosion, suppresses weeds, scavenges excess nutrients, adds organic matter, encourages helpful soil microorganisms, and the fine root system improves the tilth. It is less likely than barley or rye to become a weed; easier to kill than barley or rye; cheaper than rye; easier to manage in spring than rye (less bulk, slower to go to seed); tolerates poorly drained, heavier soils better than barley or oats.

The challenges of wheat are that it does not have good tolerance of flooding, and is a little more susceptible than rye or oats to insects and disease.

For us wheat is a good, trouble-free winter cover crop. The later it gets towards our cover crop cutoff date of November 15, the more likely we are to choose rye. Also, of course, if we have already used all our wheat seed! Winter rye is hardier than any other cover crop and can take later planting dates. More about Last Chance Cover Crop next month. Then I will also write about how to protect the soil over the winter if it is bare.

Austrian Winter Peas graphic

Secondary cover crops in October: Include legumes where possible

See my September post for more about the benefits of including legumes with winter cover crops grasses. Also how to inoculate legume seeds with the nitrogen-fixing bacteria. See Working with the time you have left for options if you are in another climate zone.

Another key to success with fall sown legumes is to sow early enough to establish before winter halts growth, and to plan not to need that plot next year until flowering time for that legume. If you have a legume that doesn’t reach flowering, it’s not the end of the world, you just get less nitrogen for your money, and won’t be able to supply all the N needs of the following food crop. Crimson clover flowers in central Virginia 4/16-5/2, most usually around 4/20. Austrian winter peas bloom at the end of April, and hairy vetch in early May.

Austrian Winter Peas. Photo UAEX Edufarm Ranch Resource Library

More about Austrian winter peas

Austrian winter peas can be sown later than other legumes.

Hardy type of Field Pea. (Black peas)
Winter-kill in zone 6, hardy in zone 7. Hardy to 0°F (-18°C). (Canadian/spring field peas are hardy to 10-20°F (-12° to -7°C))
Can sow several weeks later than clovers
Sow at least 35 days before first hard freeze (25°F/-4°C). In zone 7a, 8/10–11/8
Optimum temperature for germination is 75°F (24°C), minimum germination temperature 41°F (5°C)
Good at emerging through crusted soil
Tolerate a wide range of soil types
Make rapid spring growth in cool weather
Suppress weeds, prevent erosion
High N-fixers – a good stand can provide enough N for the following food crop when incorporated
They fix as much, or more, nitrogen than crimson clover
More dry matter than hairy vetch (which produces more than crimson clover) in the SE
Can be mixed with grasses for vertical support, more biomass and better weed suppression
Suppresses Septoria leaf spot in tomato crops the next year
Blooms late April at Twin Oaks, before hairy vetch
Flowers attract beneficial insects (especially honeybees) and reduce aphids
The tendrils and shoot tips make a nice addition to salads or stir-fries in early spring

Winter rye with Austrian Winter Peas. Photo Cindy Conner

Cautions with Austrian winter peas

Pea seed cannot be stored long. The germination rate could be only 50% after 2 years. Run a germination test if you have seed you are unsure about.
Seeds are large and heavy – high sowing rates (compared to clovers). Cost/area is fairly high, a little higher than vetches
If you haven’t grown peas or beans on that plot for some years, inoculate the seed.
Winter-killed in zone 6, at 0°F (-18°C). For the best chance of winter survival in cold areas, choose your sowing date to get plants 6-8″ (15-20 cm) tall before the soil freezes. (Hairy vetch is more cold-tolerant than AWP.)
Sowing in a mix with a winter grain will improve cold weather survival by reducing soil freezing and heaving.
May not do well if sown in spring – require a cold dormant spell.
Not tolerant of flooding, drought, high traffic, salinity, heavy shade, long cold spring weather below 18°F (-8°C) with no snow cover, or hot (or even warm) weather.
Do not regrow after mowing or grazing once blooming starts.
Peas on their own do not add much organic matter to the soil – the vines break down quickly.
May increase 39 species of pest nematodes, so if you are already having trouble with those, this is not a good cover crop for you.
Susceptible to Sclerotinia crown rot, which can completely destroy crops during winter in the mid-Atlantic. One reason not to grow pea crops on the same land two years running.
Can also be host to Sclerotinia minor, Fusarium root rot and Ascochyta

More resources on Cover Crops

My book Sustainable Market Farming has a chapter on cover crops and many pages of charts about particular options.

The book Managing Cover Crops Profitably (third edition) from the Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education Program (SARE), is the best book I know on the subject. You buy the book for $19 or download it as a free PDF from SARE.

Bell’s Bend Tennessee Farming and Education

Normally you could expect a “Cover Crops for the Month” post in the first week of the month, but October’s will be next week. I have been teaching at several events in middle Tennessee, and want to tell you about those, and include the slideshows for those that want a second look, or those who wish they had been there.

LONG HUNGRY CREEK FARM –
© 2012 photograph by Alan Messer [alanmesser.com]

We had a day and a half at Jeff Poppen’s 250 acre Long Hungry Creek Farm, where a very laid back outdoor Southeast Regional Biodynamic Farming Conference was going on. It’s in Red Boiling Springs, TN. Jeff is also known as the Barefoot Farmer, for reasons that are obvious once you meet him. Jeff began making biodynamic preparations and using the biodynamic farming method in 1986. Jeff and colleagues ran a community-supported agriculture program from 1988-2022, and they have offered internship opportunities since 1997.

Jeff Poppen’s logo

Not all the participants practice biodynamics (I don’t), and the conference was quite eclectic. I gave a presentation about growing Asian Greens to a very lively, question-filled group. Here’s the slideshow:

Optimize your Asian Greens Production 60 min.pptx

Ira Wallace and I also hosted a Q&A session on Seed Saving and Community Living. We did answer two short questions about seed saving, but most of the interest was in community living. The questioners were thinking about cohousing, or cooperative farming, or intentional communities, and had very considered questions.

We stayed two nights in the eccentric historic Armour’s Hotel with many theme-decorated rooms. Mine was about Red Hats. Definitely an experience.

A room at the Armour’s Hotel, Red Boiling Springs. The hotel’s photo.

Then we went to the Nashville Food Project on Sunday. Nashville Food Project is a community food project that brings people together to grow, cook and share nourishing food. They do community gardens, food recovery and community meals including thousands of after-school meals for kids, meals for nursing homes and all sorts. They have a lovely building for meetings, meals, cooking and everything related.

We stayed two nights with Dr Brenda Butka and her husband Dr Tom John, who were very welcoming hosts.They are founding members of the Bell’s Bend Organic Farms Conservation Corridor. Bells Bend Conservation Corridor’s mission is to promote and protect the rural character of the Bells Bend. (It’s within the city limits, and yet has never been built on.) They are working to establish an outdoor recreational, agricultural, and residential conservation district that serves as a county, state and regional planning model for open space preservation.

They are raising money to provide funding to individual land owners seeking conservation easements from the Land Trust for Tennessee. While developing and funding programs that promote farm education, environmental stewardship, and the importance of land preservation. They currently have over 350 acres in Tennessee Land Trust Conservation Easements.

The land currently includes Beaman Park and Bell’s Bend Park, open to the public.

On Monday, I spoke to the Women Farmers of Middle Tennessee at Old School Farm, where a Scottish philanthropist bought and renovated an abandoned school house and set up a non-profit farm employing people with disabilities.

They work together with MillarRich, a healthcare company that specializes in providing family-style foster care and employment services for adults and children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. They also work with The Store which operates a year-round free grocery store allowing people referred to them (and the referring agencies) to shop for their basic needs at no charge. They may shop for food to supplement their income during times of crisis and as they work toward self-sufficiency.

I gave a presentation for the Women Farmers of Middle Tennessee on Production Planning for Late Fall, Winter and Early Spring Vegetable Crops. Here’s the slideshow:

Production Planning for Late Fall, Winter and Early Spring Vegetable Crops 2023 60 mins

It was inspiring to find so many places doing good work around healthy food, good livelihood, food justice, fresh air and cooperation.

Vegetable Storage Tips

Our winter squash storage cage. Photo Twin Oaks Community

Key factors to consider when selecting vegetables for long-term storage

Most storable vegetables are roots or tubers.
Winter squash, onions and garlic are the main exceptions.
And tree fruits such as apples and pears.
There are hard-headed storage cabbages too, but those varieties are getting harder to find, as fewer people grow for storage. Search the seed catalogs for the word “storage”. Other varieties are for fresh market, or processing, and won’t store for long.
Don’t plan to grow a specific crop unless you have the right kind of place to store it!
You also need a likely market. I love celeriac, but it’s not widely known, so I wouldn’t recommend growing lots until you have an idea of the demand.
Choose varieties that are sturdy and chunky, not slender carrots, for instance. (Shriveling is related to the ratio of volume to surface area.)
Ideally, practice that variety on a small scale the year before growing a very large amount, to see how it does in your soil.
If it’s too late to do that, try three different varieties and keep records of how they do.
Read the small print in the seed catalogs! Moschata winter squashes such as butternuts. Long Island Cheese and Seminole store all winter, but acorn squash do not. You can store acorn squash for a couple of months, but then move them along to people’s dinner plates.

Harvesting tips to maximize the storage life of stored vegetables

Carrot harvest cart
Photo Mari Korsbrekke

Storing vegetables is very much a Garbage In-Garbage Out type of thing. If you put unsound vegetables into storage, they will rot and the rot could spread.
Good storability starts with good growing techniques
During growth, fend off any serious pest predation, as crops with holes in may not store well.
Be sure you know the temperature at which each crop will suffer cold damage, and get it harvested before that happens.
Harvest when the crops are optimum size and in peak condition.
Ideally, harvest in dry weather.
Handle the vegetables gently. Bruises can happen invisibly, so if you drop something, don’t store it.
White potatoes can reach a storable state two weeks after the tops die in the field. If you are in a hurry, mow the tops off, then wait two weeks. Check that the skins are “set” and don’t tear, if you rub the potato with your thumb.
Sweet potato harvest crates
Photo Nina Gentle
Trim leafy tops from root vegetables, leaving very short stems on beets and carrots. During long storage, the stubs of the leaf stems may die and drop off, but this is nothing to worry about.
If you cut the tops off beets completely, the red color will wash out during cooking. Definitely don’t cut into the root part of beets when trimming. Some people trim the long ends of beet roots, but I never have. They don’t take up much space!
I do trim the roots from kohrabi, and for that task, I do cut into the bulbous part of the root, as the skinny root has such a high concentration of fibers that it’s like a steel cable! The cut surface soon heals over.
Look each vegetable over and only store ones without soft spots or deep holes. Carrots or sweet potatoes snapped in half can heal over and store just fine, but stabbed potatoes won’t. Superficial bug bites will heal over but not tunneling.
Small roots won’t store well. We have a “training tool” for new crew members which is a bucket lid with holes cut in it. If the carrot can pass through the carrot hole, it’s too thin to store well. Potatoes less than about an inch are not worth storing. Likewise tiny turnips.
Bucket lid with holes for sorting root vegetables for storage.
Photo Wren Vile
For traditional storage without refrigeration, most roots store best unwashed (less wrinkling). This can make them harder to clean later.
If you are going to store root crops unwashed, consider setting them in a single layer on the field and making a second trip round to pick them up into crates when the skins are dry. If you are going to wash them, the opposite is true! Get them into water before the skins dry, to help the washing go quicker. We don’t wash sweet potatoes, white potatoes or squash. We do wash all the other root crops, as it’s harder to get them really clean if the soil dries on them. Provided you store them in humid enough conditions, they will not shrivel.
Some crops need curing before storing (alliums, peanuts, sweet potatoes, white potatoes).
Tops of garlic and onions can be trimmed after the crops have cured and the leaves died. Making braids or ropes of alliums with their tops on can be a profitable option.

The best storage conditions for different types of vegetables

Crates of potatoes in our root cellar.
Photo Nina Gentle

In my book, Sustainable Market Farming, I have a whole chapter on Winter Vegetable Storage.
Growers have only good things to say about the CoolBot system from Store-It-Cold. Basically you build a well-insulated space (shed, room, truck body), buy a window AC unit and the CoolBot and follow their excellent instructions to install the device which lets you run the AC at a lower temperature, like a refrigerator, at a fraction of the cost.
Hang a thermometer in your storage spaces, so you know when to warm or cool them. Digital thermometers might measure humidity too.
You can get a small electronic device that will send an alert to your phone if the temperature goes too far out of range.
For storing white potatoes without refrigerators, the best place is a root cellar. You are aiming for cool and moist conditions: 40-50°F (5-10°C), with 85-90% humidity. You really don’t want to store potatoes below that range, or they go black when you make fries.
Most other vegetables fit into four other sets of storage conditions:

A. Cold and Moist (33-40°F/1-4°C, 95-100% humidity, works for most root crops, and also cabbage, Chinese cabbage, kohlrabi and leeks.

B. Cool and Moist is mostly potatoes, as I already mentioned. Pears, apples and cabbage also store well in these conditions but not sharing space with potatoes! More on that later.

C. Cool and Dry is for garlic and onions. 32-40°F/0-4°C and 60-70% humidity. It’s also possible to store alliums warm and dry at first, 65-85°F/18-30°C, but definitely not 40-56°F (4-13°C) for garlic, or 45-55°F (7-13°C) for bulb onions or they will sprout. Never warm after cold either.

D. Warm and Dry to Fairly Moist is for winter squash and sweet potatoes. Never below 50°F (10°C). Ideal temperature 55-59°F (13-15°C). Temperatures above 65°F (18°C) hasten sprouting. Also ripening green tomatoes like 55-70F/13-21C and moist (75-85%).

For the warmer options, barns or basements might be suitable in the fall, before they get too cold.
If you are planning a new barn, consider installing an insulated basement to be a root cellar.
There are traditional in-ground storage methods, such as clamps, pits and trenches. The easiest version of this, in the right climate, is to mulch heavily with about 12″ (30 cm) of insulation (such as straw, dry leaves, chopped corn stalks, or wood shavings) over the row, and maybe add low tunnels over the mulch.
In-ground vegetable storage Drawing from WSU
Clamps are made by setting down a layer of insulation on the ground, piling up the crops in a rounded cone or ridge shape, covering thickly with straw, then working round the mound digging a ditch and slapping the soil up on the mound.

Vegetable storage clamp.
Drawing from WSU

Pits and trenches start by digging a hole, lining it with straw or an old chest freezer, layering in the vegetables with straw and covering with boards and a thick layer of insulation. Insulated boxes stored in unheated areas need 6-8″ (15-20 cm) of insulation on the bottom, sides, and top.
This all takes a lot of work, so look into the CoolBot idea first!

Suitable containers for storing vegetables

We use perforated clear plastic sacks for roots, cabbages and kohlrabi. They reduce the water losses that lead to wrinkling.;
We use net bags for onions and garlic; plastic milk crates for potatoes;
We use folding plastic crates for squash and sweet potatoes.
We leave horseradish, Jerusalem artichokes and leeks in the ground here in zone 7a, but we don’t get frozen soil for much of the winter.
We don’t use any packaging materials, but in England in the past I stored roots in boxes of damp peat moss, sawdust, sand or wood ash. I find it better to get the right storage conditions for the vegetables, rather than try to insulate them in their crates.
Set the containers on pallets, not directly on concrete floors, to reduce condensation.
When stacking your containers, allow gaps along the walls and between stacks, for airflow. Celeriac needs more ventilation than beets or kohlrabi, for instance.
Sometimes night ventilation offers cooler drier air than you can get in the daytime.

Vegetables that have particular needs for long-term storage

Sweet Potatoes in storage.
Photo Pam Dawling

Sweet potatoes must be cured before storage. This means hot humid conditions until the skins don’t rub off when you rub two together. After that you can move them to storage conditions (or turn down the heater and humidifier!)
It is important that sweet potatoes never go below 50°F (10°C) or they will suffer a permanent chilling injury that makes them almost impossible to cook. I know because I’ve made that mistake, leaving them in the ground too long, hoping they’d grow bigger.
White potatoes also need to cure until the skins toughen, in moist air (90% humidity) for 1-2 weeks at 60-75°F (15-24°C). Wounds in the skin will not heal below 50°F (10°C).
We sort our potatoes after two weeks of curing and find that sorting at this point usually reduces the chance of rot so that we don’t need to sort again.
They need to stay moist so they don’t wrinkle. They have fairly exacting temperature requirements so they don’t sprout.
Remember to keep white potatoes in the dark while curing as well as during storage.

Home vegetable storage options, from WSU

Some vegetables exude ethylene in storage: fruits, damaged produce, sprouting vegetables. Some crops are not much affected by ethylene (greens for example) and can be stored in the same space with ripening tomatoes, for instance.
Other vegetables are very sensitive to ethylene, and will deteriorate in a high-ethylene environment. Potatoes will sprout, ripe fruits will go over the top, carrots lose their sweetness and become bitter.
When storing ripe fruit, ventilate with fresh air frequently, maybe even daily, to reduce the rate of over-ripening and rotting.
Ethylene also hastens the opening of flower buds and the senescence of open flowers.
Alliums like it drier than most crops. Heed my warning about the “danger zone” sprouting temperatures. Not 40-56°F (4-13°C) for garlic, or 45-55°F (7-13°C) for bulb onions or they will sprout.

Tips for extending the storage life of vegetables

For non-refrigerated storage, unless using outdoor pits or clamps, several smaller containers of each crop are often a safer bet than one giant one, in case rot sets in.
For crops that store best at 32°F (0°C), if you can only store them in warmer temperatures (up to 50°F/10°C), provided they do have high humidity, you can expect to get about half the storage life they’d last for in ideal conditions.
After you’ve put your produce into storage, don’t completely forget about it! Keep a record of what is stored where and perhaps a check sheet for inspection. Monitor the rate of use and notice if you’d benefit from more or less of each crop next winter.
Regularly check the storage conditions are still meeting your goal, and check thorough the crops at least once a month, removing the bad ones. Shallow crates make this easier.
For root crops and squash, and maybe alliums, the initial storage period is the most likely to show up trouble. Later the crops become more dormant and less change happens.
Keeping root cellar temperatures within a narrow range takes human intervention, or sophisticated thermostats and vents.
If needed, electric fans can be used to force air through a building.
Make a realistic assessment of how long your crop will last in the actual conditions you are providing, and plan to move them all on before then.
You may be able to reallocate crops to some colder spaces as some of the original produce stored there gets used.
After long storage, some vegetables look less than delicious, and benefit from a bit of attention before the diners get them. Cabbages can have the outer leaves removed, and can then be greened up by exposing to light for a week at 50°F (10°C). This isn’t just cosmetic – the vitamin C content increases ten-fold. Carrots can lose their sweetness over time, unless frequently exposed to fresh air, by ventilating well.

Storage #4 green cabbage. The name says it all.
Fedco Seeds

Planting winter hoophouse crops

Our first hoophouse radishes germinated three days after sowing. We sowed Cherry Belle and White Icicle. We would have sowed Easter Egg if we’d had enough seed left after the outdoor fall sowings.
Photo Pam Dawling

We’ve already prepared our first bed in the hoophouse and sowed our first few crops (spinach, radishes, scallions, tatsoi, Bulls Blood beets and cress). We spread the bed prep out over 5 days and the sowings over 2 days. I’ve written lots about our fall hoophouse planting, so I’ll give you links, mention a few updates and stick to photos otherwise.

Mid-October photo of September-sown tatsoi and August-sown Tokyo bekana. Fast-growing crops make good use of small windows of time.
Photo Pam Dawling

Hoophouse Winter Schedule Tweaks and Improvements (pack more crops in, get higher yields, reduce or spread the workload). One change we made was to sow some early catch crops in areas that weren’t needed for all-winter crops until later. We mostly used tatsoi and Tokyo bekana, both fast–growing leafy greens. We intended to grow some early beets too, but the seed didn’t germinate. A new crop last winter was cress, Creasy Greens Upland Cress and Belle Isle Upland Cress from Southern Exposure. They take 50 days to maturity (in spring). We had two good intentions we did not manage to follow through on. One was to let some of the cress flower, to feed beneficial insects. And I think we got too impatient. The other was to notice which one of the two kinds we prefer and just grow that one. We didn’t manage to keep good enough records on that, so this winter we are obliged to repeat the experiment, with more good intentions!

Belle Isle Upland Cress from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

Using all the space in the winter hoophouse (filler crops for random spaces, fast-growing catch crops, radish sowing dates for seamless harvests.)
Fall hoophouse bed prep and shadecloth removal (packing away the giant piece of shadecloth until May, spreading compost, broadforking and raking the beds, direct sowing the first bed, sowing seeds in an outdoor nursery bed to transplant into the hoophouse a few weeks later). This post includes a step-by-step guide to hoophouse fall bed prep. Our soil is improving each year, becoming easier to broadfork and rake. That counters the aging process of our human bodies! One change we made last year was to measure and pin down the drip tapes 12” (30 cm) apart, and use the drip tape as a guide to making furrows (drills). This is easier than using the row marker rake, as we used to do.
Our hoophouse with shadecloth for growing summer crops. Photo Pam Dawling. We have now sewed the two pieces together, to avoid the gaping hot spot in the middle!
Hoophouse fall bed prep (includes an appreciation of spiders and a video of spider “ballooning”)
Sowing hoophouse winter crops (more details on bed prep tools and techniques, including the row marker rake if you want to use that, and links to posts about winter lettuce varieties we used in 2017/2018.)
Planning and Growing Winter Hoophouse Vegetables (hoophouse crop map, many links to other posts including a video and three slideshows, crop rotations, choosing winter hoophouse crops, posts about specific crops (with all the details), back up plans in case something goes wrong, and harvesting.)
Mid-October emergency back-up seedlings for the hoophouse.
Photo Pam Dawling. We needed to compensate for poor germination that year.
Preparing your hoophouse for fall and winter (includes one of my slideshows, and a more detailed discussion of lettuce types and sowing dates, information about salt build-up and our wash-down strategy in a 3-slide mini slide show, when we close and open the doors and windows, and a Be-Prepared Winter Kit list)
Planning winter hoophouse crops – our step-by-step process for hoophouse crop planning.
Spinach seedlings (from pre-sprouted seed) emerged on the third day after sowing. here they are on day 4. Photo Pam Dawling
Winter hoophouse growing (includes a round-up of earlier posts, and a discussion about the value of crop rotation in the hoophouse, and a list of 20 benefits of having a hoophouse.)
Spinach variety trial conclusions This year we are growing Acadia. Johnny’s do not recommend this variety for late fall or winter sowing, but it did very well in our hoophouse, sown in September, October, November and January.
September in the hoophouse: sowing spinach

Two jars of sprouted spinach seeds and grits to prevent the damp seeds clumping. presprouting spinach seeds for a week in a fridge gets round the impossibility of getting spinach to germinate in hoophouse soil at 80F (27C) as it is September 11.
Photo Pam Dawling

Cold-tolerant lettuce and the rest, our January 2018 assessment of the varieties we grew that winter and which survived the unusually cold spell we had.
Hoophouse video interview
Year-Round Hoophouse Vegetables slide show
Hoophouse Cool Season Crops slideshow
Hoophouse Many Crops slideshow

One side of our hoophouse on Sept 10. Three beds with cover crops of buckwheat and sunnhemp (which got bitten down at a young age by Something), and one bed under solarizing plastic in hopes of killing nematodes. Photo Pam Dawling

Zipper spider on the pepper plants in our hoophouse September 10.
Photo Pam Dawling

Cover Crops for September: wheat and crimson clover

Crimson clover is a beautiful and useful cover crop.
Photo Kathryn Simmons

Note: the day after I posted this I found I was mistaken in believing barley to die at a warmer temperature than oats, so I’ve edited it.

Focus Cover Crops for September: Winter Wheat and Crimson Clover

In August I wrote about cover crops such as millets, southern peas, buckwheat which are frost-killed. If it’s still too early to sow your winter cover crops, sow summer cover crops. Before I get to the wheat and crimson clover, I’ll mention some other useful seasonal cover crops.

Winter-killed, not frost-killed, cover crops

There are also cover crops that are not frost-killed, but die later in the winter, at colder temperatures, such as oats and barley. Only sow oats or barley if you are sure you can get them turned under or killed by cold winter weather before they seed. They will not mow-kill, so if the weather doesn’t kill them, you will have to turn them under. Be careful buying feed-grade seeds (rather than Organic seed-grade), as they can contain weed seeds including GMO canola.

Late corn undersown with oats, now mowed high, and the sweet potato patch now sown in winter wheat and crimson clover.
Credit Ezra Freeman

If the area is clear of vegetable crops by 40-60 days before frost, sow oats to winter-kill. If possible add a legume (soy and spring peas are easy, and will be killed by the frost, so they won’t complicate food crops next year). For us with a first frost date of October 14-20, the cut-off date for oats is September 7, or September 15 if we really push it. Sowing too late means you don’t get enough growth in the fall, and the soil is not adequately protected from erosion or from weed growth.

We sow oats after growing early sweet corn, spring broccoli, spring-planted potatoes, cabbage, kale, or early season spinach, lettuce, beets, carrots. Spring oats die after three nights at 20°F (-7°C), or a single plummet to 6°F (-17°C), leaving the plot quick to prepare for early crops next year. Winter oats are hardier, but my goal with growing oats is for them to die in winter. After oats or other winter-killed cover crop, we like to plant our early spring food crops, peas, cabbage, broccoli, carrots, March-planted potatoes, spinach and the first sweet corn.

Don’t let your cover crop barley go to seed! Photo USDA

Fall-sown barley (Hordeum vulgare), grows even faster than oats, but not as quickly as winter rye, and it won’t die as early in the winter as oats. Barley dies at 17°F (-8°C). It usually will die in Zone 7 and colder regions. The dead barley residue protects the soil through the winter, and dries into what Barbara Pleasant calls “a plant-through mulch” in spring in cold zones.

See Planning Winter Cover Crops, a post that includes my Short Simple Guide to Winter Cover Crops and my slideshow Cover Crops for Vegetable Growers. Oats, barley, wheat and rye sown too early can head up and seed before you get to winter, making them less useful, and more of a weed problem.

Winter-hardy grass cover crops to sow in September

It is too late for us to usefully sow cover crops that are not frost-hardy, as they won’t make enough growth before getting killed.

Winter rye and winter wheat are two grass cover crops that can be sown in the mid-Atlantic in September. Wheat is easier to incorporate than rye and has less of an allelopathic effect on small seeds, the inhibition of germination that lasts three weeks after rye is turned under. It’s true wheat doesn’t produce as much biomass as rye, so there’s the tradeoff. We sow wheat if the area is ready for cover crops 20-40 days before frost. This allows us to make faster use of those plots in the spring, compared to plots sown to rye.

For us wheat is a good, trouble-free winter cover crop. Winter wheat prevents erosion, suppresses weeds, scavenges excess nutrients, adds organic matter, encourages helpful soil microorganisms, and the fine root system improves the tilth. It is less likely than barley or rye to become a weed; easier to kill than barley or rye; cheaper than rye; easier to manage in spring than rye (less bulk, slower to go to seed); tolerates poorly drained, heavier soils better than barley or oats. If you have leftover seed, wheat can be sown in spring – it will not head up, but “wimps out” when the weather gets hot.

The challenges of wheat are that it does not have good tolerance of flooding, and is a little more susceptible than rye or oats to insects and disease.

Secondary cover crops in September: Include legumes where possible

With careful planning, you can grow next year’s fertilizer for your later spring-planted vegetables! Legumes grow nitrogen-fixing bacteria on their roots, which can feed the next food crop. You may need to buy a suitable inoculant if you are introducing a new legume species. You may decide to inoculate anyway, for insurance, even if that type of legume is already somewhere in your garden. Before sowing the legume seed, dampen it, sprinkle the inoculant over the seed at a “pepper on your dinner” rate, and stir it in. Then sow the seed. Be sure not to make the seed wetter than slightly damp, or you’ll need to spread it out to dry a bit before you sow.

Two other key parts of being successful are to sow the legume early enough to establish before winter halts growth, and to plan not to need that plot next year until flowering time for that legume. At flowering time, legumes have the maximum amount of the nitrogen nodules they will have. Don’t let the legume flowers set seed, or they may become a weed problem. Take notes on when various legumes flower. If you have a legume that doesn’t reach flowering, it’s not the end of the world, you just get less nitrogen for your money, and won’t be able to supply all the N needs of the following food crop.

September (40-60 days before frost) is a good time to sow clovers here, provided you can supply enough overhead irrigation. They will make some growth in our climate before winter, and then a lot more once spring arrives.

Crimson clover cover crop with bumblebees.
Photo Bridget Aleshire

Crimson clover is a good September choice, if you won’t need to prepare the area before it flowers (in central Virginia 4/16-5/2, most usually around 4/20).

For a cover crop to survive the winter, sow winter wheat with Austrian winter peas, crimson clover, hairy vetch, red clover, white clover or fava beans. Hairy vetch takes a few weeks longer than crimson clover to reach flowering. Which you choose will depend what you want to grow there next spring and when you need to plant it.

Clover for green fallow in early September

See August’s post for info on planting a Green fallow plot (Full year cover crops)

Time is running out on this for us, but you may still have enough warm weather where you are. A green fallow crop (all-year cover crop) will replenish the soil and reduce annual weeds for the following year. In late August, or early September, four weeks after transplanting your fall brassicas, especially cabbage and broccoli, but also kale and collards, broadcast a mix of clovers: 1 oz (30 g) Crimson clover, 1 oz (30 g) Ladino white clover and 2 oz (60 g) Medium red clover per 100 sq ft (9 m²). Crimson clover is a winter annual and will be the biggest and the first to flower, in April. Medium red clover is a biennial and will be the next to flower. White clover is perennial and will take over the plot as the others subside. Be sure to get the medium red clover, not the Mammoth kind that dies when mowed. Likewise, for maximum benefit, get the tall Ladino white clover, not the low-growing “wild” type. In March, mow down the old brassica stumps and let the clovers flourish. You will be mowing this patch about once a month from March to October next year to prevent the crimson clover and the annual weeds from seeding.

Cover crops to sow soon after your first frost date

I’ll say more about this next month, and because I want this website to be useful to a geographically wide range of growers, I’m including a preview here. If the area is ready for cover crops up to 10 days past the frost date, sow winter wheat or winter rye with hairy vetch or Austrian winter peas. Winter rye is hardier than any other cover crop and can take later planting dates. But it is a bit harder than wheat to incorporate in the spring. Sow winter rye from 14 days before to 28 days after first fall frost. See Working with the time you have left in the Summer Cover Crops post. Austrian winter peas can be sown later than other legumes, it’s too late for clovers.

My book Sustainable Market Farming has a chapter on cover crops and many pages of charts about particular options.

The book Managing Cover Crops Profitably (third edition) from the Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education Program (SARE), is the best book I know on the subject. You buy the book for $19 or download it as a free PDF from SARE.

Success with Spinach for Fall, Winter and Spring

January spinach from our second hoophouse sowing.
Photo Pam Dawling

Success with Spinach for Fall, Winter and Spring

Spinach is a much-loved crop for us. We sow outdoors and in the hoophouse in early September for harvesting from fall through to spring (April). We sow outdoors in late September for a crop to overwinter as small plants and be harvested in the spring. We also sow in our coldframes in mid-September. These are more sheltered than the beds outdoors, and the spinach makes faster growth. We sow more spinach in the hoophouse in October and November. We sow in the hoophouse in January to transplant outdoors and in the hoophouse in February for spring harvests. We are able to keep harvesting spinach (leaves, not whole plants) from October 15 to May 25, all the way through the winter. Central Virginia is too hot to have spinach during the summer (we switch to chard).

Spinach over-wintered in our cold frame
Photo wren Vile

Unsurprisingly, I have written about spinach several times.

Spinach Variety Trials Conclusion in May 2019. Our top general favorite is Acadia, although Reflect does better outdoors overwinter. This post includes links to earlier posts about spinach varieties, including Spinach Trials Update, April 2018.

What causes spinach leaves to turn yellow, in May 2019

yellowed spinach in May. We had transplanted too soon after tilling under some big weeds.
Photo Pam Dawling

A bed of healthy green Reflect spinach on May 3
Photo Pam Dawling

What makes vegetable crops bolt and how can I stop it? March 2021

Spinach Varieties

Choose varieties that do well in climates similar to yours, in the conditions you have when you plant and harvest. We used to grow Tyee for all plantings, and were very happy with it. But it has been pulled from the market because it had disease problems in the Pacific North West, where spinach seed is grown. We have tried and not continued Chevelle, Corvair, Renegade (grows fast, but has thin leaves and bolts early in spring), Avon (Downy Mildew in winter).

Also see the 2015 Greenbank Farm Spinach Variety Trial. The farm is in Washington State. They evaluated 10 varieties of savoyed and semi-‐savoyed spinach with two side-‐by-‐side replication in spring. Abundant Bloomsdale, Bloomsdale Long Standing, Butterflay, Giant Winter, Dolce Vita, Longstanding Bloomsdale, Lyra, Solstizio, Tyee, Winter Bloomsdale. The overall star of their trial was Solstizio from Nash’s Organic Produce.

Spinach plants on February 5. left to right: Avon, Renegade, Escalade, Acadia.
Photo Pam Dawling

Paul and Sandy Arnold in Argyle, New York, made a great slide show reviewing Spinach Varieties in High Tunnels. I think it’s no longer available online, but I did learn that in 2019, their top Winter Spinach Varieties were Escalade, Carmel, Whale, Space, Reflect; top Summer Spinach Varieties: Banjo, Seaside, Woodpecker.

In 2011-2012, High Mowing Seeds in northern Vermont did a spinach variety trial with 24 varieties. Three farmers in Iowa conducted a 2021 trial of spinach varieties and seedling methods. They compared yield, bolting and yellowing among three spinach seeding methods: seeder (1x rate), seeder (2x rate), hand-seed (2x rate); and between two varieties (Kolibri, Kookaburra). Two of them found no statistically significant difference of seeding method on yield; one found no difference in yields between the two varieties, but using a seeder at a double rate produced significantly higher yields than the other two methods.

When to sow fall spinach

Spinach does not germinate in hot soil! Use a soil thermometer and wait for the soil to cool to 68F (20C), or see the next section about sprouting spinach seed in a cold place. If you have no soil thermometer, see my post chickweed, hen-bit and dead-nettle, and use the info that was originally written with lettuce in mind, for spinach! There are photos there of these three plants at seedling stage. These are winter annual weeds here, that don’t grow in summer. Once we see their seedlings emerging in late August (a cool summer year like 2023) or September (most years) we know the soil has cooled enough to sow lettuce and spinach directly in the ground.

A trick for getting good timely germination of spinach seed is to put it (in sturdy resealable plastic bags or jars) in the freezer for about two weeks. Take the seeds out of the freezer the day before you want to sow (or start sprouting them), but – important – do not open the bag or jar. Leave it to warm to ambient temperature before opening. Otherwise the warm humid air will rush in and coat the cold seeds with condensation, reducing the shelf life of whatever seed you have left over for another time.

See our Spinach Variety Trials and Planting Plan, in February 2018:

September 6 is our first sowing (sprouted seeds) in the hoophouse for winter harvest 10/30-2/15, or later if it doesn’t bolt.
We sow outdoors on September 7 (sprouted seeds) for growing under rowcover and harvesting in fall and winter.
September 18-20 we sow in our coldframes and outdoors for harvest in early spring, until late May.
October 24 we make our second hoophouse sowing, to feed us November 25 to May 7.
On November 9,we make a third hoophouse sowing, intending to use these plants to fill gaps in our hoophouse as other winter crops come to an end.
January 16 we make more sowings in the hoophouse, some to continue to fill gaps there along the edges of the beds where they won’t fight with the tomatoes and so on, which we transplant starting March 15. Most of the spinach sown on this date is for transplanting outdoors on February 21.
January 29 we sow in flats in the greenhouse if we see we haven’t got enough bare-root transplants in the hoophouse.
February 10 If we don’t have enough transplants, then on this date we sow outdoors with rowcover, for spring harvests until May 25 if we’re lucky. We have backup plans on backup plans for this!
In the hoophouse we continue transplanting spinach to fill gaps until March 31.

Sprouting seeds before sowing is a way to success in hot or very cold weather.
Photo Pam Dawling

Sprouting Spinach Seed

This very easy work-around involves soaking the spinach seed in water overnight, draining it, and putting the jar on its side in the fridge for a week. If you remember, give the jar a quarter-turn each day to even out the moisture. You are not growing bean sprouts! A little neglect will not cause harm. The ideal is to have short sprouts, not long ones, as those break off more easily. Sow the seed in the furrows gently, by hand. If the sprouts have got tangled, add some water to float them apart, drain them, spread them on a tray, or a layer of rowcover, to dry a bit, then mix with some inert dry soil-friendly material like uncooked corn grits or bran, which will help them not stick together.

Sowing Spinach in Speedling Flats and Floating them in Water

Another option is to start the spinach in flats and transplant it all. That’s a lot of work, but we found we could save on the daily attention time and the transplant time by using 120-cell Styrofoam Speedling flats. Sow one or two seeds per cell, then float the flats all day in water. Depending on your scale, this could be a baby bath or a stock tank. Remove the flats each evening and let them drain all night (while it is hopefully cooler). With just twice a day visits and no hand-watering, this is a big time saver, and we have got good germination rates.

Transplanting spinach from a Speedling flat. Butter knives are the tool of choice for easing the little wedges out of the tapered cells.
Photo Denny Ray McElya

When it comes time to transplant, the tool of choice is a butter knife. Use the knife to wiggle a wedge-shaped hole in the bed. Slide the knife down the sloping side of the cell, and, holding the base of the plant with one hand, use the knife hand to lift and flick the plug out. If all goes well, the plug will be then be resting on the now-horizontal knife, and you can slide it into the pre-made hole and firm it in.

Growing Spinach

Spinach makes growth whenever the air temperature is 40F (4.4C) or more. So any winter protection you can provide, in the way of cozy microclimates, rowcover, coldframes, or a hoophouse, will increase your yield. Spinach is more cold-hardy than many people realize. It dies at 0°F (-18°C) unprotected outdoors. Savoyed varieties tend to be a little hardier than smooth-leaved types. Large-leaved savoyed spinach outdoors with no protection can get seriously damaged at 10F (-12C). Small-leaved plants are OK down to 5F (-15C).

Weeding rowcovered spinach in winter.
Photo Wren Vile

Our outdoor spinach gets hoops and thick rowcover (Typar, 1.25 oz/sq yd spunbonded polypropylene, with 75% light transmission, and about 6 F (3.3 C) degrees of frost protection). It can last for 6 years or more. When we got 0F (-18C) the spinach leaves that touched the rowcover got big patches of beige/tan dead cells, but the plants recovered to produce more leaves.

Ben Hartman (author of The Lean Farm) wrote Testing the Limits of Cold Tolerance in Growing for Market magazine in February 2014. He reported that his young hoophouse spinach in Goshen, Indiana, with mid-weight rowcover survived -16F (XXX). Ben points out that spinach less than 1″ (2.5 cm) tall is very cold-tolerant. Bigger plants need more protection if it’s going to get that cold.

You can read more about growing spinach in my Cooking Greens monthly series.

Growing bare root spinach transplants

Small spinach seedlings for bare root transplants. Photo Pam Dawling

We grow our spring spinach transplants (as well as kale and collards) in the soil in our hoophouse, sowing them in late January. See bare root transplants . You can find more links and info in that post. Growing bare root transplants saves a lot of work and a lot of greenhouse space.

Harvesting Spinach

Our goal is sustainable long-season harvesting. This is important for winter crops, as making a new sowing during cold dark days will not produce much food until spring comes around. It’s like the goose that lays the golden eggs – keep the leafy “golden eggs” coming

We harvest spinach by cutting individual leaves and leaving the plant to continue to produce more.

Our rule is “Leave 8 for later” – cut off large outer leaves close to the base of the plant, being sure to keep at least 8 of the inner leaves growing on each plant. Over-harvesting leads to decline.

When we finally pull up the bolting plants in spring, I’m always amazed to see how many leaf-scars there are on each plant, showing just how much we’ve harvested.

Hoophouse spinach. Far row: bolting Renegade; Near row: Escalade.
Photo Pam Dawling

For those relatively new to this blog but living in a similar climate zone, I want to point you to The Complete Twin Oaks Garden Task List Month-by-Month. It includes a link for each month’s task list. I notice from the site stats that some of you are finding your way there, but now there are so many years’ worth of posts it’s perhaps harder to find. Happy browsing!

Tomato Varieties We Tried in our Hoophouse

Hoophouse squash between beds of tomatoes in July.
Photo Alexis Yamashita

Each year we grow two 96′ (29 m) beds of early tomatoes in our hoophouse. We plant them mid-March, start harvesting at the end of May, and pull them up at the end of July or beginning of August. By that point the plants have reached as high as we can go and the outdoor plants have started producing large amounts, so we don’t need to ask more of the hoophouse plants. Each year we grow varieties that we’ve had years of success with, plus a few new ones.

Cherry Bomb tomato.
Photo Johnnys Selected Seeds

Last year I wrote My favorite tomato varieties, about the four we trialed then: Pink Boar, Geronimo, Cherry Bomb and Estiva. We decided to grow Pink Boar and Cherry Bomb again, but somehow we didn’t! Pink Boar developed more splits and more disease in the last few weeks as the season reached its end. Cherry Bomb was out of stock when we placed our seed orders, so we tried another red cherry, Sakura.

Sakura red cherry tomatoes from Johnny’s

Sakura is a 55 day indeterminate red cherry. It did well, resisted disease. But when I checked why it didn’t seem very productive, I discovered that a confused planter had planted only one Sakura and an extra Black Cherry instead! Next year, maybe we’ll try Cherry Bomb again, or try really planting two Sakura!

We stopped growing Stupice, a 62 day indeterminate red, in favor of

Mountain Magic tomatoes in mid-July.
photo Pam Dawling

more Mountain Magic, 66 day indeterminate reds. A plan is just a plan. Somehow, a bunch of Black Cherry (64-75 day indeterminate purple) got substituted for some Mountain Magic and some Garden Peach at planting time, due to more worker confusion. We love Black Cherry, but they take longer to pick than larger tomatoes. Some might argue that Mountain Magic at 2 oz (56 g) are not that much bigger then Black Cherry at ½-1 oz (14-28 g), but as you see, they are at least twice as heavy. The disease-resistance of Mountain Magic, Glacier and Garden Peach was medium this year.

None of us missed the Stupice, with their green/yellow shoulder problem. As I noted last year, the lack of red lycopene in the shoulders might be due to too much heat. We did try not pruning the Glacier (56 day determinate red) at all this year, and we got less of a green shoulder problem with those, so that’s worth remembering. We’d like to keep that one, as it is so fast at ripening. Sungold is still faster, though catalogs claim Glacier should be one day ahead.

Tropic tomato in mid-July. Photo Pam Dawling

This year, I wanted to try several large red round fast-maturing tomatoes, and a couple of different colors. To be chosen for our hoophouse crops, tomatoes have to mature in 80 days or less. Our main red is Tropic (80 day indeterminate red). It’s good at setting in heat and has a good flavor, but this year had a lot of disease. This summer has been peculiarly mild, up until mid-August, so not a good test of heat-setting tomatoes.

We tried two plants each of Skyway (78 day 8-12 oz (112-168 g) indeterminate red) and, for the second year, Estiva (70 day indeterminate red). Both looked impressive: big shiny unblemished fruit. But no flavor worth reporting. Estiva had good disease-resistance, and split resistance, but was slower to fruit than the 70 day claim.

We planned to try Premio (60 day 4 oz (56 g) indeterminate red), but didn’t get any seed. Maybe next year?

Mountain Fresh Plus tomatoes from Johnny’s

We did try Mountain Fresh Plus (75 day determinate large 8-10 oz (112-224 g) red, short plants) for a second time. “The most widely-grown market tomato in the East and Midwest” Johnny’s Selected Seeds. We are a fan of many of Randy Gardner’s “Mountain” series of tomatoes, but not this one. It wasn’t very productive, and the flavor wasn’t exciting.

Tropic remains our main red slicer.

Jubilee tomato in our hoophouse.
Photo Pam Dawling

Jubilee (80 day indeterminate orange) is our main orange slicer, and that did very well, with medium disease resistance this year. The fruit looked a little different this year. Possibly we were still sowing seed we bought during the pandemic, which came labelled “Probably Jubilee”. It’s also called Golden Jubilee.

We also trialed Mountain Spirit (77 day indeterminate large yellow/red) and Purple Boy (80 day indeterminate large purple, Park Seeds). Neither of these wowed us much. Production was low and flavor was only so-so. We had hoped Purple Boy would be a good substitute for Cherokee Purple, which splits and yields poorly in our hoophouse. Mountain Spirit had a mushy texture.

I’m concluding (provisionally!) that large fruited tomatoes are not such a good idea for us. We do better with more productive, more modest sized tomatoes.

We came up with an idea to reduce the chance of misplanting in future. We didn’t want to write labels for every single potted tomato, so we have been labeling just the rows of 3 or 6 in a standard 1020 flat, which holds 18 pots. This means we often have more than one variety in a flat. We have small numbers of purple, brown and green pots, so we can use those for particular varieties. Mostly we have the standard black pots. Our new idea is colored dot stickers, which are often to be found in our office is oddly large numbers. I wonder if anyone else ever uses them?

Planting Garlic Scallions

Harvesting Garlic Scallions

Other Posts About Garlic

Planting Garlic

Garlic Growth Stages

Additional Stages:

Cover Crops for November: Winter Rye (with Austrian Winter Peas early in November)

Last Chance Cover Crops in November: Rye

Other key features of winter rye cover crop

Include Austrian Winter Peas if possible in the first week of November

Last Chance cover crop

How to protect the soil over the winter if it is too late for cover crops

More resources on cover crops

Putting new plastic on the hoophouse (again)

Tool List:

New Hoophouse Plastic Step-by-Step Instructions

Focus Cover Crops for October: Winter Wheat and Austrian Winter Peas

October is too late to sow winter-killed cover crops in central Virginia

Winter-hardy grass cover crops to sow in October

Secondary cover crops in October: Include legumes where possible

More about Austrian winter peas

Cautions with Austrian winter peas

More resources on Cover Crops

Key factors to consider when selecting vegetables for long-term storage

Harvesting tips to maximize the storage life of stored vegetables

The best storage conditions for different types of vegetables

Suitable containers for storing vegetables

Vegetables that have particular needs for long-term storage

Tips for extending the storage life of vegetables

Focus Cover Crops for September: Winter Wheat and Crimson Clover

Winter-killed, not frost-killed, cover crops

Winter-hardy grass cover crops to sow in September

Secondary cover crops in September: Include legumes where possible

Clover for green fallow in early September

Cover crops to sow soon after your first frost date