I make a point of gardening for 4 seasons. I use every method I can think of to extend my harvests into the winter and have tomatoes, eggplants, other crops saved into March after an October frost. My main step is to use the parts of the lot where the crops will be most protected and that was different than I originally expected.

Please join my effort to get a Root Crops Forum at Gardenweb. Please visit and add a message at
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Harold Eddleman, Southern INdiana.

I am just beginning to experiment with four season gardening. We normally have very mild, very bearable winters here in south GA.

This year has been cold though. Several days in the 20's already and we are just getting started. I know, that is not really cold to some people but to me .....brrrrr.

I currently have cabbage, collards, broccoli (sp/), snow peas, garlic (first time), and 4 hoop houses with a variety of salad greens and goodies.

Making some changes in the garden now for this Spring. Getting new beds ready and moving my compost bins around. Planning and laying everything out on graph paper as usual.

Lots and lots to do before planting by March 15.

Good gardening!

Aubrey

hi aubrey, sounds like your 4-season gardening is going strong. how long have you been at it? i am suppose to be planting seeds for warm season crops, so i will have an early harvest. i will keep indoors. i have to get in early harvests because of intense july and august, when plants stop growing. then they start up again afterwards. yes 20 is cold. dress in layers. doing soil prep too. i have half raised beds. i have to put down hardware cloth for gopher protection. just started last year.

I have been gardening in some degree or another for 25 years or more. I started when I was a kid.

When we bought this house, I really started gardening on a serious scale. My garden plot started out as 10 x 10 and then grew rapidly to its current 30 x 30. I have no more space for expansion now. In order to overcome my space issues I practice intensive gardening and a lot of vertical growing.

In order to eliminate as much work as possible I changed over to "Weed Free" or "no till" gardening about four seasons ago. I suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands and, although I have had surgery for it, I want to eliminate the physical stuff if I can and raised beds are much, much easier. Especially with the no till methods.

I no longer turn the compost bins either. I have a total of seven bins in various stages and I just refuse to get out there and turn them. I stack them up, wet them down, and just keep them moist until they are ready to use.

As for four season gardening, I am really new. I just built my first hoop houses this fall. I have always grown cold weather crops here such as the cole family but have never tried anything under covers. Working well so far.

I have been changing my garden over to raised beds over the course of the last two seasons. The conversion will be complete before spring arrives.

I am going to have to put hardware cloth under the sweet potato beds this year to help with the mice. We don't have gophers, but I am sure they are similar in technique to the mice that I have.

My children are 13, 11, and 7 and they make pretty good garden helpers. They like the fact that there is so little weeding to do and I use them to help spread the straw and hay that keeps the beds and pathways covered.

Do you ever use shade covers for the summer heat to help your plants along? That might help. I do that as well as growing some heat sensitive stuff under the shade of trellised bean or cucumber vines.

Aubrey

I've been reading Eliot Coleman's book on gardening all year around and have been sizing up varoius places to grow vegs all year. I remodeled our rental house and took four glass sliding patio doors and made two coldframes and one seedling mini-greenhouse. The spinach is doing quite well and the radishes are at least growing but our temps have been brutal at times with lows in the teens and a couple of single digits thrown in there. My long term plan is to construct a greenhouse from some more of the doors I've collected and put the coldframes in them for the double layer of protection. We have a south facing hill near our root cellar that would be a great place for this setup. The Europeans have a long tradition of using the natural characteristics of the land to provide warmth and shelter for their winter crops. Coleman's book is very inspirational and helpful. Just when you think nothing is growing down there in the cold, you are rewarded with a wonderful spinach salad right after Christmas!