I have a spreadsheet made so you can plug in your average last freeze date and get dates for indoor starting or direct sowing/transplanting. I am working on the fall planting dates. Vegetables only, and I am still tweaking it. Do you use spreadsheets?

I do find most of those winter gardening sources are geared toward an entirely different climate than ours.

I know how to use excel, I have not made myself a spread sheet...

AmyinOwasso/zone 6b(6b),

Please post the spreadsheet. OR email to Johnny8@cox.net.

Johnny

hmm, let me see if I can figure out how to post it. Otherwise I will e-mail.

I know we're rolling up on onion ordering time and I've been out of pocket. Have I missed the annual Dixondale discussion?

Kate 7a OK

i love it. I garden the same way. I plan and plan then life gets in the way. Haha

Spreadsheet? I would forget to fill it out!!! I am sure it works great.

Do you know about the one at Johnny's Select Seed. You just plug in one date, calculate, and print a copy. I find it very helpful.

Oops, forgot the link. Carol

Planting Calculator

Soonergrandmom - do you find it very accurate? I looked at that one and it seemed that the dates on it were way off if you go by the OSU OKC garden guide. OR may be the garden guide is now old and out dated?? Are you in the OKC area?

I sent Johnny a copy of the spreadsheat. I believe to email people on Houzz you have to follow each other. If you would like the spreadsheet you can contact me through Houzz with your email adress.

Ezzirah, It is fairly close for me, but I always observe the weather and make decisions based on the type of weather we are having when it is time to put out the transplants. The weather doesn't use a calendar, so it may not be exact, but it is a good guide for me to remember to start seeds. For example, it shows I should start tomato seed between 17 Feb and 9 Mar, and my normal date is around the Feb 20th. Around my average frost free date, I check the forecast for 10 days out and decide if I should plant. I usually only plant a few plants the first week and make sure I have plenty of backup plants. I live north of Grove. Carol

Soonergrandmom - I went on the spreadsheets and yeah, they are fairly close. I was not using them right. (*hangs head in shame*) Even the fall one was pretty close. I think I could take those and modify them to figure out when to plant for winter. Thanks!

Seeds for generations has a nice spreadsheet that you put in your numbers and it will calculate dates to plant with or without frost cover, indoor start and direct sowing. It helped me putting my plan together.

I'm slowly building a garden into a food forest. Whenever I acquire seeds from something I've eaten I throw them into the garden. It's still a little bare, but I've found that the canopy significantly increases yield. Should be interesting to see how it goes this year. I'm going this route because I don't have a great spot for a garden and I'm tired of trying to keep my garden neat.

jmichigan,

If it makes food, it is a good garden. What's a few weeds amongst friends?

Neat is over-rated. Does Mother Nature grow everything in neat rows? With the ground carefully cultivated in between the rows? Heck, no, she mixes it all together in one glorious mosaic of beauty. I hope your food forest grows well and makes you happy.

the problem is that it's on a slope and gets sun about 6 hours a day. Works out really well for herbs, tomatoes, and peppers but everything grows in a stunted fashion. Carrots are all tiny, my romas looked like grape tomatoes, etc. Greens seem to like it. Everything will take hold, just doesn't want to grow big.

jmichigan some things favor a food forest more than others. Remember, some varieties of fruit - like your romas - were developed under mono culture and favor those conditions even if they are heirloom or open-pollinated. I'm finding some varieties don't mind dappled shade. Takes time.

It does take trial and error and also time for those tree roots and leaf litter to build up to a very nice loam for root crops. However, I just think carrots are little divas and are extremely picky. I've had good luck growing them in ground but they're stunted, puny or weird. I'm still using raised beds and containers with "perfect" soil for carrots.

I'm happy to hear this is what you're doing. It's not the most aesthetic way to garden, but it's the healthiest. I hope to plant tons of trees. I'm certain I'll be cutting down individual branches later on for light.

The fact you get carrots is impressive to me! I never can grow those things. LOL! I never been a fan of overly neat gardens. I do my best to keep the weeds at bay, but I don't kill myself over them. Most of my spots are raised beds, but I have a couple in ground that I didn't feel like hauling dirt because of the size. A food forest sounds wonderful!

The seeds for generations calendar is WONDERFUL! I love it!

ezzirah,

I would suggest that you consider a walipini for winter food.

Johnny

More Walipini info here: http://www.the-meal.net/graph/manuel_walipina_benson.pdf

I will add that to my list.

WoW! I am always learning about such amazing things from all of you. I am so grateful for this forum---I cannot even tell you. Thanks and keep the info coming.

Michelle

Johnny - I live on barely a 1/4 acre in the middle of the city. I don't think I can pull that off. But BOY! would that be garden heaven! The first year I gardened I didn't understand how a cold frame went so I dug 2 feet down and put my plants in there and put plastic over it. It worked! All the plants didn't harden off good, but they lived while in the ground. LOL...

ezzirah,

I have seen folks in Europe grow a large part of their food in cold frames just like you built.

I'll not soon forget picking up a couple of teenage hitchhikers on the autobahn. I took them home to a little town nearLake Constance (Bodensee).

Their mother went out the back door and picked almost everything we had for supper from her kitchen garden. Talk about fresh!

Johnny

I spent a month in Italy in 1999, mid-January to mid-February. The temp got to 13 F which we were told was unusually cold. I was so impressed with the large number of cold frames. I wasn't impressed with ALL the vegetables. They seem to have several licorice-flavored plants that they use. But there were others too. Even more impressive than the vegetables were the cold tolerant flowers. There were pansies and others in window wells all over town. During the night shutters were closed over them and during the day the shutters opened to give them sun and warmth.

JohnnyColeman - I may have to redig that cold frame and expand it now! I lined it with bricks and would harden off plants in it, but I imagine one could leave the bricks out and use the ground under it to plant. Now a full Walipini would not be feasible in my yard, but something modified would work!

Edit to add: I will say this, my kale that I planted in October is still out there going strong with no cover, protection nothing from the few cold snaps we have had. I am now wondering if we don't get to scared of cold.

ezzirah,

We planted kale, mustard, turnips and rutabaga. None of it seemed to mind the weather. Some of our turnips got half as big as my head.

Our 2016 Fall garden will be even better. We are improving our soil with compost.

Johnny

Most winter crops are fine at temperatures above 20 degrees. Some tolerate lows in the teens. Some tolerate temperatures even lower as long as they have been able to have prior and gradual exposure to increasingly cold temperatures that have hardened them off to cold weather. Down here most cool-season greens have made it through this winter with only the most minor of damage, and often our plant damage here is partly the fault of warm winter days in the 70s that encourage a lot of tender new growth which then suffers freeze damage on a 22-degree night. When the winter highs stay more normal, like in the 50s or the 40s, the plant damage is less.

Cool-season plants, in general, are either hardy or semi-hardy, and knowing which group they're in helps you anticipate what sort of cold damage might occur.

Hardy cool-season plants can be planted before the last frost in spring or ahead of the first frost in winter and will tolerate a lot of cold temperatures, generally down at least to 25-28 degrees, which means they'll tolerate a heavy frost or a hard freeze. The common hardy veggies are: cabbage, collards, kale,chichory, leeks, kohlrabi, onions, parsley, mustard, green peas, spinach, turnips, broccoli and radish. The most cold-hardy are collards, kale and spinach, which (if already hardened off to cold temperatures) can tolerate temperatures down into the upper teens.

Semi-hardy (aka as half-hardy) crops include cauliflower, celery, Swiss chard, Chinese cabbage, lettuce, endive, beets, carrots, rutabaga, salsify, and Irish potatoes. These can withstand a light freeze (with temperatures from 29-32 degrees but generally suffer damage, and sometimes plant death, if subjected, unprotected, to a hard freeze (28 degrees or below) or light frost. The cold damage can vary a lot. For example, potatoes can freeze back to the ground, but will quickly resprout new foliage. However, if this happens repeatedly, it can hurt your overall yields because of all the energy the plant expends recovering from each hard freeze.

Often, in the years I plant a big fall garden, the hardy crops often make it through most of the winter, if not all of it, without suffering any significant damage. Often, though, a hard freeze gets them in February. I think this ocurs because of the increasingly warmer and sunnier winter days which push the plants to make new growth and then the tender new growth is often what suffers the damage while the older tougher growth doesn't. February weather is often a roller coaster ride, and the roller coaster highs and lows can be a lot for plants to tolerate. Last week our plants had a couple of 77 degree days. This week, they'd had 20 and 22 degree nights. That's a wide range in a short time.

In the spring when we still are having recurring cold nights, I watch the overnight lows carefully and cover up semi-hardy plants with floating row cover if we are forecast to get colder than they like. I also watch my actual temperatures compared to the forecast lows and if our actual temperatures are trending colder than our forecast lows, I keep that in mind. The last few weeks, our overnight lows are consistently running 3-6 degrees lower than forecast, so if the forecast says "30", I think to myself "27". Last night our forecast was for 30 and we went to 26 here (and 22, I think, at our mesonet station). . Now, see, that wouldn't hurt my parsley plants that have been in the garden all winter, but if I had new potato foliage up, it might have suffered light damage.

I follow "Mother of a Hubbard" on facebook. Here is her blog Mother of a Hubbard. Today she posted pictures on FB showing damaged plants (brassica salad mix) 3 weeks older than some undamaged ones from the same bed after a 0 degree night. Apparently up to a certain point the younger plants are actually more hardy than the more mature. Of course there are all the variables that Dawn mentioned. This lady grows a four season garden in TN, which should be closer to our climate than Maine. She grows under fabric tunnels.

I follow her too. She is very encouraging.

Wow! Thanks Dawn for the list! I am now following Mother of a Hubbard. I think I just spent the past three hours combing over her sight and taking notes..

I am going to do so much more this fall. I had the best time sitting in the garden with my grandson eating raw rapini. He was chewing and hollering " daddy come have a snack" best times

ezzirah, You're welcome.

Kim, That sounds so wonderful. Your grandson is learning to eat veggies and he thinks it is fun. What could be better than that?

It is the best part. I wasn't raised eating fresh veggies that I remember so sharing this passion with him is pure joy. He did not understand why daddy didn't just sit in the dirt and chow down like us.

luvncannin,

Good job!

Kim, I was half-way raised eating fresh veggies because my dad loved gardening and also canning. Even when all of us kids were small and he had to share the back yard with 4 children, a dog, a cat, and a swimming pool, he still gardened in a corner of it and also bought weekly fresh veggies from a market garden that had a farm stand on a corner in our little suburb of Ft. Worth. My mom, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with the work involved in gardening and/or canning and/or cooking fresh veggies so she was perfectly content to buy canned veggies at the store and just open a can and dump the veggies in a pot and cook them. Luckily, I got my love of gardening, canning and cooking from my dad. As we kids got older and playing sports, hanging out with friends and working after-school jobs replaced playing in the yard, dad's garden space got bigger and bigger.

Mom cooked during the week and dad cooked on weekends, so at least we kids were exposed to both the cooking of fresh veggies and to canning a few of them as well as being exposed to the use of canned veggies during the week. I loved going with my dad to the farm stand for veggies on Saturday mornings too! Then we went across the road a bit to an egg stand to buy eggs brought in fresh from a local farm. For as long as that egg stand remained there, we never bought standard grocery store eggs, and I think the egg stand explains why we have chickens today to provide us with our own eggs. Fresh is best, and once you get used to fresh, nothing else will do.

Every June at our house was peach and plum canning time when I was a kid, and June-July were salsa canning time, and what I learned from the whole experience was that I preferred the weekend meals with their fresh veggies (and lots more of them) more than the weekday meals with standard commercial canned veggies. To this day, I won't eat a green bean from a can! For me, they have to be fresh or frozen fresh from our garden. So, raise up your little man in the right way with his fresh veggies and fruits and he'll never forget it.

Of us 4 kids, by the way, two became gardeners and two didn't, but all of us love to cook, and we definitely got that from our dad as well. There's no doubt in my mind that your grandson will grow up loving to eat from the garden and he'll learn to cook those things when he is older. My son is an awesome steward of the land and a fantastic cook, and after he finishes building his own house, he wants to put in a huge garden and fruit orchard. He already raises heirloom poultry. It seems like the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. (grin)

Dawn

And that brings us so much joy too..my son was tilling for me to nite and talking about everything we are doing to the property in an excited tone and I am so happy. It means the world to me to see him and his son enjoying the same things I love.

My dad tried to have a garden on and off all my life but he had no clue what he was doing. Sometimes he would get lucky but most if the time it wouldn't work

After he passed his little scrawny Lantana grew and grew and was the biggest Lantana I have ever seen.

My mother always canned but never allowed us to help in any way. I loved home canned foods but was always shooshed outside when she would can. I didn't even know how to cook when I first married. My poor husband survived on hamburger helper and pot roast.

luvncannin,

One of our 2 year old volunteers helped us harvest PEPH peas last year. She ate fresh peas all afternoon. I thought she might blow up before that day was over.

Johnny

Kim, It is funny how different people perceive gardening. My mom and dad both grew up poor in the country during the Great Depression (and my dad who was 10 years older than mom, remembered the struggle of the Dust Bowl years but she was too young to remember that time period). Both lived on farms and the families pretty much lived off the food they could raise. Times were very hard.

My dad loved gardening and, to him, it was a privilege to be able to raise his own fruits and veggies. He'd take a big brown paper sack of home-grown tomatoes to church every week and give tomatoes to anyone who'd take them. He loved canning. He had a garden every year until his Alzheimer's Disease progressed to the point that he forgot what a garden was.

My mom hated gardening and viewed raising your own food as something you'd do only because you were too poor to go to the grocery store and buy food. She wanted nothing to do with the garden or with canning. She had a beautiful flower garden for many years, but only because Dad and I planted it and took care of it. All she had to do was look at it and enjoy it. To this day, I don't really think she understands that I prefer fresh, home-grown food for many reasons. I'm fairly sure she still thinks that I have a huge garden because we are too poor to buy all our food at the grocery store. She's 87 years old and if I haven't changed her mind by now, I guess I never will. When I was a kid, her parents still lived in the country and had a huge garden. She kept telling me they had the garden because they were too poor to buy food. I never believed her. I thought that having a garden made them rich in all the things that mattered.

I look at my son and see our family tradition of gardening and our love of rural living in him and it makes me proud, so I understand your happiness that your son and grandson share your love for the land.

Johnny, See there, you are changing lives in more ways than you know! It always amazes me to see how much fresh, home-grown produce affects people. It is like a whole new world unfolds before them as they realize how much better everything tastes fresh from the garden (or the farmer's market or a farm stand). You know, even fresh veggies from the grocery store taste better than fast food, restaurant food or canned/frozen food, and it isn't hard to convince people of that once they taste fresh, just-picked food. I'm glad that 2 year old didn't explode from eating all those PEPH peas.

The "first" of everything everything gets eaten right in the garden as I work....the first strawbery, the first peach or plum, the first lonely spear of asparagus, the first leaf of lettuce, the first sugar snap pea, etc. and the first cherry tomato. (I save the first big tomato to eat with my family though.) When I work in the garden in spring and summer, I often skip lunch because I've been grazing in the garden all day. I do take a large bottle of water or green tea out with me when I go out, but otherwise the garden sustains me. Gatorade? I don't need no stinkin' Gatorade on a hot day---I just eat handfuls of cherry tomatoes. It is a nearly perfect day on a day like that.

We hit 76 degrees yesterday and it was about as perfect of a gardening day as a person ever gets here in February. I love this weather. It is hard to remain calm and to not get overly excited and plant everything too early. I was tempted to get my soil thermometer and check the soil temperatures to see if the ground is warm enough for some early tomato plants, but I talked sense to myself and refrained. I know the soil is still too cold, and the nights are too cold as well, but you can forget things like that on a perfect winter day. The problem is that every day is not as perfect as yesterday was.

I am proceeding with planting cool-season crops, though, and my onions shipped yesterday so they'll likely arrive here today or tomorrow. I can't wait. I'll likely plant my potatoes sometime in the next 3 or 4 days. Much depends on how many fires we have and how much, if any, that disrupts my garden plants. With the wind letting up over the next few days, I'm hoping we won't have any fires at all. I'd rather be in the garden.

Dawn

Dawn,

I wish you could have seen my face this morning at about 9:30. I was gob smacked.

I had just gotten to the farm (St. Francis of the Woods) when the director casually walked up to my car and asked if we would like to grow on the 10 acre plot just North of the main farm. One of the very few times in my life that I had no reply. I have been saying WOW, over and over, all day.

My first thought is a small family could make their living on that 10 acres. The entire 10 acres is a heavy loam about 10 inches deep with a base of gray clay. The entire plot has a natural gentle slope. It is at the top of a very low hill, so it is downhill in all four directions.

I'm still saying WOW.

Johnny

That is great news Johnny. Keep up the good work.

soonergrandmom,

I wish I could take credit for this turn of events.

Johnny

Johnny, WOW, WOW, WOW! Does he mean you can grow stuff on it now? Like this spring? I am speechless. What an incredible opportunity.

I think you do get some of the credit. The Good Lord must have inspired the offer because he knows you'll find a way to use the land to work for good.

What a blessing! I'm so excited for y'all and can't wait to see what you do with this new farm land.

Dawn

Johnny - WOW is right!

I love hearing everyone's story of how they started gardening. When I grew up we never had fresh anything. We grew up in a very urban area and we didn't have a lot of money and my mother being a single mother made due with what she had. Which meant a lot of canned, box, bottled everything. I didn't taste broccoli until I was 18 years old...seriously! I know what they mean when they say there are "food desserts" out there. I lived in one. As i got older and out on my own I never ate and processed anything. Still don't. It's a treat to me, still is, but really it's a basic human right.

The very first green beans I picked from the garden I brought them in the house and kept looking around because I kept smelling bananas. But I didn't have any bananas in the house. Then it occurred to me that that smell was coming from the green beans! I had no idea fresh, home grown green beans smelled like that. I was hooked from that point forward.

This years garden is going to be huge. And I am ticked pink.....

Dawn,

The 10 acres has a cover crop of arrowhead clover and Austrian winter peas currently. I helped plant it last Fall. The land has been used for hay for a long time. That means a lot of the P and K have been exported with the hay. I think we should allow the cover crop / green manure crop to build up a lot of biomass then mow and incorporate. We carefully inoculated all of the seed we planted there.

This Fall I would plant tillage radish, cereal (Winter) rye and hairy vetch. I am impressed with the ability of tillage radishes to bring up minerals, from lower in the soil profile, to the root depth of most veggies. Then we could grow anything we want. However, the deer pressure is heavy there so that limits what we can grow.

Still feeling overwhelmed. Good thing I'm not the only member of this corporation.

Johnny

PS I'll be consulting with our (Payne) County Agent very soon.