Hey, Barbara, you'll get lots of great ideas here -- I do!

I had a cold frame over my cabbage and romaine and it kept them going till late December. It was just a couple of old shower doors on top of the raised beds. There are lots of other possibilities -- PVC pipe frames with plastic sheeting is popular. I don't have enough room to do too much but it's fun to try new methods.

There are lots of books that will come up when you do a search on "Year-Round Gardening". Jerry Baker is always good, as he grew up in Oklahoma. I read Elliot Coleman's "Four Season Harvest" and it was pretty interesting and very detailed. He lives up north so he has colder temps than we do. Good luck!

Barbara,

I have used hoop houses made of PVC pipe frames covered with 4 or 6 mm plastic to extend the harvest by growing earlier in the spring or later in the fall. You can use the same types of hoop houses to grow cold season crops all winter long if you want to. I suspect the hardest part for me would be to build one that could handle the hard north winds. If you are in town where there are other houses, other buildings like sheds, some fences and hedges, trees, etc. in close enough proximity to serve as a windblock, I think a hoophouse would be very easy to erect and maintain all winter.

As Ilene mentioned, Eliot Coleman's "Four Season Harvest" is the classic book on the subject. One technique I learned from him was to use a frost blanket-type row cover on top of plants that then have further protection from a hoop house or high tunnel. That way, there are two layers of protection from the cold weather. However, Mr. Coleman, who is nothing less than a national hero to many farmers/market growers and serious hobby gardeners, has a brand new book out (April 2009) called "Winter Harvest" and even though it is primarily aimed at market growers, a serious home gardener could benefit greatly from reading it and applying his techiniques. People who've read both "Four Season Harvest" and "Winter Harvest" have stated in their reviews that basically "Winter Harvest" is an updated version of "Four Season Harvest" that includes what he's learned or changed or refined since he wrote "Four Season Harvest", so I don't know that you'd need to read both. Although, I do have to say that every word he's ever written in a book or magazine article or in any of the speeches he's given over the years is well worth reading!

A couple of the most important things to remember about growing in a hoophouse or high tunnel or in short tunnels (more about them later) or cold frames is that you have to be able to open doors or vents to let heat out during the day or your plants will roast. Also, the larger the structure, the easier it is to maintain the appropriate temperature because very small structures heat up too fast and also cool down too quickly.

You can use short tunnels that consist of wire or PVC hoops placed over garden rows and covered with floating row cover, plastic or both. They'll keep plants somewhat warmer, but not as well as a larger structure that has more mass. You can help increase their ability to hold heat by using a soil heating cable run down the row or plastic bottles spray-pained black and filled with water and used as solar collectors. I have used those big cat litter jugs spray-painted black as solar collectors in a hoophouse to protect early tomatoes from a late freeze with sleet and snow (and didn't lose a plant). If you use only a frost blanket type of floating row cover, I believe you pick up about 8 degrees of winter protection. With plastic, you can increase that and you can increase it a bit more with solar collectors.

I haven't read "Winter Harvest" yet, but it is on my list of books to read before winter arrives.

Finally, although some people have success using PVC framing, others may need to use electrical conduit as framing if they are in a high wind area or in an area where snow or sleet are likely. Another way to support a hoop house structure in those more difficult conditions is to use cattle panels as part of the support for the plastic roof. The Ardmore-based Noble Foundation has done a great deal of research into using hoophouses in agriculture. I've linked some of their data below that tells you how to errect a low tunnel. Also, you can cruise around their website or google to find their various instructions for making hoophouses (and raised beds) of different materials.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Nobel Foundation's Low Tunnel How-To

Ilene...
Thank you for the great ideas. I'm trying to think "creatively" about how to do this the least expensively. I think I remember some folks using old windows, and making a sort of A-frame out of them.
I'll check the local library and see what gardening books are available. There may be some that you mentioned.

As for my watercress garden, I really got into it this morning and dug out a bunch of water iris that were getting invasive there by the bird bath. I wanted to make more room for the watercress to spread out. It was a very gnarly job to say the least. I ended up digging a small "water feature" around it and deepened it, filled it with water and then planted more watercress all around the edge. Next, I'm going to line the edge with some pretty rocks, and fertilize once again. It looks good, and now I should be able to have plenty of one of my favorite greens without having to pay high store prices.

Ya know, I probably never would have gotten into this sort of thing if it hadn't been for this forum. And I am having so much fun, I can hardly stand to stay inside, (unless it's a 100 degrees outside, lol

Barbara

I don't know about watercress, but I grew salad greens all winter in southern Oklahoma in a hoophouse. It was walk-in size and measured 10x13. It had a heavier structure than pvc pipe so I didn't have problem blowing it but it was hard to keep the plastic tight enough that the wind didn't whip it. As an experiment, I broke off tomato suckers and put them in a raised bed in the corner in the fall and had tomatoes into December, but I did have to put a Coleman type lantern in there a few nights to keep things a little cozier. I frequently used a floating row cover when it was going to be cold. I was about 30 miles north of Texas in the central part of the state just above where Dawn lives.

Now I live almost that distance from Kansas and just a stones throw from Missouri and have a much different climate. I decided to grow salad greens last year using a very low tech method. I have some black nursery pots that are thin black plastic. They are at least 3 feet across and over two feet deep. They are the kind that the larger nursery trees come in. In fact, I got them out of a dumpster in Ft Worth where they had just landscaped a commercial building. I could only figure out a way to get home with four but wish I had more. I used good container growing mix in the container and planted lettuce, spinach, mustard, etc. in the fall and we ate salad from it until the third week of December. We were leaving for Christmas so I didn't try to keep it longer, plus it was 17 degrees when we left home. (Mexico felt good.) I didn't have a cover on it at all except when the temps were going below freezing I threw an old blanket over the tub. I took it off during the daytime hours unless the temperature was ridiculously low. I only had 12-14 inches of soil in the tub so the tub itself provided protection from the wind. The sun would heat the tub during the day, and covered, it seemed to hold enough heat at night. I wasn't desperate for the salad greens, but just wanted to see if it would work. I may plant all four of them with something this year because some of the bigger plants kind of shaded out the smaller ones. Eliot Coleman's book is a good read. I have the first one, but didn't realize he had written another on the same subject. It becomes a bit of trouble to always have to check the weather and remember to cover and uncover, but most of us gardeners check the temps anyway even when we don't have veggies growing.