 In early February, we were at the Wisconsin Garden Expo, where I presented and we tabled. Last time we heard about gardening in a warmer, more variable environment, and this week we'll be going the other way, talking about winter gardening. This is the Lotech Podcast. Hello and welcome to another break from our current season. I'm Scott Johnson from the LotechNology Institute, your host for podcast number 78 on March 8th, 2024, coming to you from the Lotech Recording booth. Thanks for joining us. We're still taking a break from our tour of Cooksville in 2100 to hear about how gardeners can extend their growing season into the winter. This was recorded live at the Wisconsin Garden Expo. And this is the last time I'll say not to bother following us on Twitter, X, or whatever it's called right now. We don't post there anymore, but you can still like us on Facebook, find us on Instagram, subscribe to us on YouTube, and check out our website, LotechInstitute.org. There you can buy both of our podcasts, as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. Also, you know the spiel about advertising on podcasts. If I'm not doing the ad, someone else is getting paid. We put out all of our content for free, but if you're in a position to help support our work and be part of this community, please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as $3 a month through our Patreon page that's Patreon.com slash Lotech Institute. Supporters do get the podcast a week early. Another way to support us is to donate your used car. If you're in the U.S., contact us for details. Again, we're about to get going with the recording, but to housekeeping items first. First, this is a live recording, unedited, so the quality may be slightly less than usual, and also the slides referenced in the talk are available on our website's blog, or can be seen if you're watching this on YouTube. Enjoy. Today, I'll be talking about Four Seasons Growing in Wisconsin, who am I. I'm Scott. I run the Lotech Institute, and we think a lot about how we're going to be living in the year 2100. In terms of Four Seasons Gardening, that might be pretty easy for us, as we will be probably losing our worst month. By the year 2100, our growing season will be very different. We'll have lost our coal this month, and we'll gain a new hot month in the middle. So if you like tomatoes, that's good for you. And if you like keeping your plants alive through the winter, that's also good for you. You know, there's obviously some negative repercussions to warming temperatures, but I'm not talking about those today. Yeah, so like I said, these slides will all be up on our website shortly. We also have a podcast called the Lotech Podcast, and we put that on YouTube, as well as the usual podcast apps and places. And I'll have these slides as the background. So if you missed anything, I can listen to this all over. Relive the experience. All right. Today's topics are baseline assumptions, biological adaptations, methodological adaptations, and infrastructure. So that's kind of how we're split up. Now, the first thing to think about is, where are we? We are in, why are my notes not coming up? That's not good. That's not good. It's OK. I have them, came prepared. We are in DFA, or Continental Humid Climate with a Hot Summer. That'd be Zone 5A and 5B. That's where we are right now. Obviously, this will be changing over time, but that was my last talk. I gave a talk yesterday and the day before about gardening in a warming Wisconsin. So I'm really bracketing both ends of things here. So yeah, we're right there on the edge. Depending on where you came from, you might be 5A or 5B. Or maybe somewhere farther afield. Welcome. Assumptions. OK. So today, I said foreseason gardening. I could have said winter gardening, because really, honestly, I'm not going to get too much into the summer other than how you can better prepare for fall, winter, and spring gardening. So I'm going to assume that we all have some background knowledge about growing during the regular season. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that. I'm hoping that you might have some experience with seed starting, things like that. Because sometimes I'm going to suggest experiments that are better if you can start your own seeds rather than having to buy them in just for economy's sake. So yeah, I'm going to be talking about extending the season into the fall, into the winter, starting earlier in the spring, or continuing from the fall straight through into the spring. I'm going to touch a little bit on indoor gardening. There was, I really wish this talk had been earlier in the weekend because there were some indoor gardening talks that would have been helpful because I'm not going to talk about dedicated indoor gardening. I'm going to touch on bringing outside stuff in and all the bugginess that that could entail and fun that can be. But I'm not going to talk about starting, growing the entire life cycle of a plant indoors, although that would be a method to grow in the winter. I'm just not going to get into hydroponics or anything like that. Some winter crops are for direct eating. Others are for keeping viable plants in stasis. But I'm not going to get into or really talk about the likelihood of us starting, growing, and expanding a lot of plants in the winter. Really winter and late season growing, early season growing is really just about keeping plants alive and really making your garden into an outdoor refrigerator so that you can take from that all winter or go into the spring with incredibly large mature plants that then explode once the temperatures warm up again. So it's getting a really early start. You think you're giving an early start on the season by starting your seeds now. Imagine if you had started them in August. That's going to be a lot, a lot more if you can keep them alive through the winter. So a lot of the information and images will come from books that'll be listed at the end of the publication. Again, publication will be on our website tomorrow morning on our blog. So a couple of caveats. So we like to talk about full sun. Well, remember full sun in the winter is like five hours, which is not really full sun. And it's a glancing sun. So the angle of the sun is going to be putting out less watts per square meter or however you want to measure it. So there's just less sunlight. So that's why we're really not talking about putting on growth in the winter. We're going to be keeping things alive. They're going to put on their growth in the fall and then hopefully just maintain that winter. Even if cold, hardy, the plants really aren't putting on a lot of green growth in the winter. So you're just keeping your cabbage and your Brussels sprouts. Winter hardy varieties are slow growing. They're often short, stubby, and they have a lot of dry matter. Why is that? Well, dry matter doesn't freeze. If you have really leggy, tall, quick growing plants, so you put on a lot of nitrogen fertilizer, for example, those will freeze a lot easier and they're not going to survive into the winter months. So their problem is these types of varieties are not as economically viable. They don't grow as fast. So there's not as much market for them. So you have to kind of look around. Seed savers is one place, bakers. There's a couple others that have these specialized varieties that are a little slower growing and are for the kind of specialized winter market. I always recommend people do A-B testing. Now, if you've never tried to keep something alive through the winter, then you're just doing A testing. I guess B testing would just be letting it die. But A-B testing means do what you usually do and then do half of what you're doing a new way. And then you can see, does this do better than the way I've done it before or not, because a lot of times I have people, I grow a lot of potatoes. I've done a lot of potato research for a small scale and folks will come up to me and say, oh, last year I grew my potatoes like this and it worked out great. I said, okay, compared to what? Well, just great. I'm like, well, okay, maybe it was a great season and you could have just thrown potatoes in a pile of leaves and they would have done great, right? So you need to have that comparison. And so I really encourage people, anytime you're taking on a new method or a new idea or even a new plant variety, do A-B testing. Do what has worked for you in the past and then try something new next to it and see which one works better for you and then take the winner of that and do more A-B testing. Or if you're really into it, do A-B-C-D-E-F testing. But that way you're likely to get something that you've had success with before or maybe you'll find something new that works better with less risk of losing everything if you're B, if you just try the new thing and it fails. And saving your seeds. Again, I'm coming up the tail end of the Garden Expo but there's a lot of resources out there for you to be able to learn to save seeds. Take notes. I'm gonna develop, I came up with this product in my last talk. I'm coming up with a garden calendar or a notebook for you and it's gonna be perfectly tailored for the garden note taker. Half of the book is gonna be March, April, May and then the last little bit of the book, a couple of pages is gonna be July, August, September because that's exactly how much garden notes we take. We're all very good note takers in the first three months of the gardening season and then in the last couple of months you could put it on a postcard. Guilty also. So, but it is important to save your seeds with notes so that you know, oh, we had a really hard winter, we had a really easy fall, we had a really wet fall so that you know which varieties are working better for you in these different conditions. Not that we can necessarily predict is this gonna be a wet and warm winter fall and winter or is it gonna be a dry and cold one? We can't predict that but what we can do is if we know we have hot or cold, wet or dry there's only four real options that you're dealing with and so if you have four varieties that you plant going into the winter with knowing that three of them are likely gonna die or possibly gonna die or do not as well as the one you're gonna get something to survive the winter and if you're saving your own seeds that doesn't cost you very much, right? Because the seed cost is essentially just your own time which is invaluable. I know all of our time is invaluable. All right, I don't get paid by the hour anymore. I don't get, let's not get into that. Okay, specific varieties. So before I put up the next slide and I see you all pull out your cell phones and take pictures. We have these, what's on this next slide. As a handout, I probably have enough for everybody otherwise it's gonna be at our booth or online so deep breath. There can be a whole bunch of varieties here. You don't need to memorize them. Yeah, that's why, like I said, these are on the website. I've prepared you and I still got an O, okay. So yeah, these are just a collection of suggested from various winter gardening sources of varieties that do well in the winter, in cold weather. They have their approximate temperature gradients and this doesn't mean that's the temperature your thermometer says. That means that's the temperature in the bed where it's living. And we're gonna talk about how we can really try and save ourselves with the mechanical stuff later on. We're still talking about varieties. So these are some of those that if you can find them are likely to do a little bit better. Again, I have a handout, so don't worry. I'm gonna move away from this now. Did anyone get them all written down? No, okay. See me afterwards if you do. You're gonna be a speed reading champion. Okay, a couple of warnings when we start talking and we're gonna talk about methodological adaptations. So whatever you do, start slow. Don't say I'm gonna winterize my entire garden and you spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours your first year. Try a better two, right? Like work up to this. I don't take that advice, but I should. No, I'm getting better at taking that advice as I go. And also think about how you eat and what you eat. Raw veggies have a lot more nutrients, so think about planting things for the winter that are going to be more easily eaten raw or at least close to raw. Things like spinach, kale, lettuce are often better choices than things that need a lot of preparation where you're gonna lose a lot of those nutrients, right? Cause you're gonna be getting less of them but you're gonna be getting some greens in the winter, which is nice. Again, let me stress again, you expect very little growth in the winter. We're converting our garden into basically storage space and stasis for plants rather than somewhere that's gonna put on a lot of green, leafy growth in the winter, just not. We just don't have the solar energy. So one thing that we can do, think about your soil. Soil drainage is a big factor. Low spots collect water and cold air. And so if you have a well-drained soil, it can keep plants from suffocating, the roots from suffocating as that water pools and accumulates and doesn't get transpired or moved around by the usual processes that are at play in the summer. And you can get rotting in your roots and then the plant dies. So you could go as far as installing drain tile or a raised bed with a good draining soil, maybe picking four beds or so that you're going to convert into your winter beds and putting a bit of an investment into having a well-drained soil there. Where I had a person in a previous talk who lived on sand, so she's already set, but then she has to try and build up nutrients anyway. So that's a different kettle of fish. Sand already drains well. It warms and cools really quickly, which can be a detriment in the winter if it cools too quickly. But if it's cooling without moisture in it, it's less detrimental to the plants than freezing solid with lots of moisture in there. Silt or clay loam, like what I'm on as clay, is slower to warm but also slower to cool. So you'll get a bit of attenuation into the fall, but it does drain poorly, so I try and grow on top of that. Dark soil obviously absorbs and maintains heat better. So dark mulch, I'm a big mulch fan, is an option that can help push the season a little farther if you have that dark mulch, rather than straw, which is light colored and bounces a lot of solar radiation off. Obviously we want to build up a large hummus layer that's aerated, pH stable. It'll hold a more even temperature, nutrient dense. I mean, it's not rocket science to say the better your soil is, the better your plants are gonna do. So we're all working towards that anyway. So yeah, compost, compost, compost as much as, okay. So what does good soil, well-drained soil look like? It's loose and has good growth, but not the type that has jumping worms go through it. That's not the type of looseness that I'm talking about. I did a vermicompost talk and everyone's asking me about vermicompost, or about jumping worms, which thank goodness, luckily. I don't have experience with it, but I know others have and it sounds pretty nasty. Bright soil color, not dull, we all, yeah, we've seen that bright, healthy looking soil. Looks like it's very happy that dull sheen on it is really frustrating. Earthworms, insects are in it, although in the winter they're all gonna go down and become dormant. Water obviously drains well through well-drained soil, that's kind of self-fulfilling there. You really want that moist, cakey type of feel rather than a sodden sponge or anything like that. Crumbly texture and a balanced pH. Again, gold standard, we can't get everything. Soil nutrients, again, composting, building up the soil's nutrients is more important in winter and it's also important going into the winter. So in that fall you don't wanna throw on a ton of nitrogen. You don't wanna build up a lot of green, leafy growth that has a lot of vascular tissue that's gonna hold a lot of water because that water freezes and can help kill the plant more quickly. So it's a balanced, slow growing approach. Slow and steady will win the race in the winter. Manure is okay, evaluate your source, obviously. I get a lot of manure from a local horse stable. Again, you don't wanna over-apply that nitrogen, go for a balance that too much quick growth in the fall. Like I said, weakens the stems, they dye you slow and steady, say it again. Cover crops, particularly clover, I like clover, is easier to cut and work into the soil than cover crops. You can use these with bigger equipment. So there's a lot of winter rye stuff like that. Perfectly fine if you've been doing that and it's working for you, great. I like clover because you can just kinda churn it right in to the soil and I put that in a lot of my beds. I wouldn't necessarily be trying to over-winter this but this is a good thing to toss into beds before they go to sleep in the winter. Clover will do fairly well in pretty cold temperatures anyway. So mulch, big fan of mulch. If you were at any of my talks yesterday, probably spent half the time talking about mulch. Straw can insulate, but like I said, straw will bounce a lot of the sun off the soil so straw isn't necessarily the best bet. Dark mulch, which can absorb heat and regulate moisture but I'm not talking about wood chips. Wood chips will sap a lot of nitrogen out of the soil although if you're applying a lot of nitrous fertilizer maybe that would, no. Generally speaking, wood chips will sap too much nitrogen out of the soil and aren't as good but a dark vegetative mulch can be really helpful. It absorbs heat, it regulates moisture because even though we're in the middle of winter you're still on a warm day, every couple of weeks you're still gonna want a garden, water and I'll get to irrigation here in a minute. Oops, sorry, let's have a little more, oops. Root vegetables can be heavily mulched for overwintering so instead of storing your carrots in your basement in a pile of sand like I do, you can actually, if you can keep the ground from freezing you can mulch them pretty heavily and then go through and dig them in the winter on warm days or you can be trying to overwinter a few carrots for seeds the next year because they'll take a year and a half to seed. Too much sawdust or wood chips again, saps nitrogen from the soil. You are best, your best bet is to apply mulch before the ground freezes. Once the ground freezes, mulch will just keep it frozen longer so you wanna get that mulch on there earlier in the fall and so obviously mulch is an organic adjunct and will break down and add nourishment to your soil, suppresses weeds, which I'm gonna get to here in a minute, regulates moisture and temperature, prevents erosions, all great things that we wanna be looking for in the winter. Sighting in microclimates. So again, my small joke here is that microclimates would be what I would call a kid's laser tag zone if I were gonna open one but microzones can be created but with as little as a stone wall or other infrastructure, plants, trees, things like that in your garden they can bump up your gardening zone, a zone or even two if you're depending on how you're doing it. So right now we're in 5A but if I put this stone wall running east to west in my garden, in front of it that might be six or maybe even seven and behind it might be a four. And so for the winter obviously we're gonna wanna be growing in front of it because that's going to help maintain and radiate that few sunny days we've had lately but it'll help radiate that heat and maintain that heat into the bed. South facing slopes, beds south of a building, walls or even an arbor vitae can give a little bit extra sun and temps through the winter and protection from northern winds. So even like sometimes old farm buildings would be built around a central yard and that central yard would be protected on multiple sides to help keep it a little extra warm in that little patio area and that could be a good gardening spot. And then there's of course using valleys or larger scale topography to site your plant. Hedges are great but they're really slow to mature so if you were putting hedges along the north edge of a growing space that's great but it may take a little while. Walls are good although actually hedges are better in some ways because walls will create a back draft and it will actually drop if it's a cold north wind it can drop a lot of snow and cold right after that wall and create a circulation whereas a little bit of air passing through makes less of a low pressure zone and so the winter wind can actually blow off of those crops so it's nice if you can get a little bit of pass through on those walls that are preventing those cold north winds from coming in. Also think about cold air kind of like a water right? It sinks into low spots and will sit there. So if you have a completely solidly fenced yard and it gets full of cold air coming in from the north it can just be held in there whereas if you let that cold air seep out on the southern side you're gonna be better off. So for example this is my backyard in my garden and these are kind of like my micro climates and the way that I did this is well one way which is kind of nice right now and especially for winter gardening this is applicable go into your garden, well most of us have at least in my garden the snow is pretty much gone but if we get a snow and then we get a sunny day walk through there a few times and watch where the snow melts first. Where the snow melts first are good spots potential spots for winter garden beds because those are getting the most sun for some reason that snow is melting off of there faster. Those are really great spots to think about your winter beds. In the summer things might be slightly different because the leaves will have leafed out on the trees but for me what I did in the summer for my different micro climates was I looked I went out every hour on the hour and I marked where had sun so each one of these is how many hours of sun and so I have my hot spots I have my cool spots and I plant accordingly like right here behind my this is north over here this is south down here right here behind my house I have probably zone seven it's protected by the garage and then trees and then trees and it's a nice really warm growing space so I can grow some pretty southern stuff there in the winter it's also pretty nice and then yeah it varies through the yard but you can do this with yourself if we get another good blanket of snow and then a warm sunny day walk through and look where melts first and that can be a good guide for you. So every variety is different some need to be mature before they freeze others need to be mostly done with growth others can be really small and make it through the winter it depends on the garden or it depends on the variety and so you're gonna want to time your fall plantings just like you carefully time your spring planting so that you have an appropriate amount of growth a lot of things like cabbages and Brussels sprouts you'll want to have pretty much fully grown by the time it starts to freeze real hard if you want to be picking mature because they're not gonna put on any more growth if you're trying to get your starts going for the spring already in the fall and you just want them to get mature enough that's a different story they don't have to be quite as big all right I have what's on the next slide also on the handout so you don't have to freak out so this is from Territorial your results may vary but this is a good place to start this is a really great chart of stuff to start going into the winter when you could start it how large you want it to get before your transplanting it has frost hardiness it has all kinds of useful information on here so worth having a start here and then modify according it doesn't have dates on here because it's kind of a space agnostic I mean I guess it does have dates but we can shift these depending on where you are it'll take trial and error because your backyard your garden space might be a slightly warmer one than your neighbors so it's very individualistic all right beds you need to space them out a little bit more in the winter you can't have as much tight spacing as you can get away with in the summer just because the solar resources are so much less and also you want to encourage large roots which will help support them through the winter raised beds are a great option because raised beds have frames that you can attach things to because I love to accessorize for the winter and for our purposes accessories are things like row covers that we're going to talk about in a little bit but having that raised bed framework is really helpful for attaching things to also keeps you from walking on them they're often better drained so raised beds are a great candidate all things being equal for your winter beds rather than in ground in ground's great you can do a lot with in ground but raised beds are a little more easy to work with easier to work with okay weeds and pests so this we're not just you know it's not just going to be your cabbage that lives through the winter because you're going to make this little micro biome for them to live in we're going to have or micro zone we're going to have a great environment for weeds and pests to go through the winter too hooray hooray so this is in one of my column pods one of my little obviously I needed to weed that before the winter and I hadn't opened this in months and I popped it open I'm like oh crap and all of my cabbages and these cabbages were these were not for eating in the winter these were cabbages to start so like when I start in when I weeded this and then I started these you know that's a pretty good start for you know April or I guess March right but they're all ready to go in December and then they made it through the winter and then boom I had really big nice cabbages really early in the year because I wasn't these weren't for winter eating these were for spring starts but yeah the weeding here was abysmal I don't know I have to get my assistant on that um what's that? yeah that's coming up in just a few slides yeah that's that's the big thing is the dust is a protect oh the weeds yeah exactly yeah exactly pests should be evaluated with an integrated pest management you want to go into the winter with as few pests as possible I mean that's true anytime right we don't want to leave them around but you want to be have a plan or do some research and come up with a plan to try out that year as we have less severe winters that's more time in the summer and the fall for our pests to proliferate and to weaken our plants going into the winter if you've had a lot of pests trouble you might if they're been weakened by pests you might just as well harvest them rather than try and get them to go through the winter you want to cull and have only the healthiest plants going into the winter geographic ranges are going to expand I found in my research recently that contrary to what I had thought which is oh the colder a winter it is the more likely it is to kill a lot of bugs a lot of pests in the ground and that actually studies have been shown that that's not the case because the the insects get down the pests get down low enough that 20 below doesn't really affect them it's a slow damp cool spring when the fungus wakes up and the fungus goes out and eats lots of dormant insects before they can emerge so it's actually a cool slow damp spring that will bring down some pest some pest load rather than a severely cold winter although I guess you can have some winter kill harvesting eat the worst looking ones first so if you have a row of 20 cabbages pick the one that's not looking as good as the others you want to leave the best looking ones unless you're having like you know the pope over I don't know who do you have over I don't know you then you then you can pick him a good cabbage to get the pope but yeah if you're all things being able to pick the the less good looking ones the longer ones or the the best looking ones will last longer so yeah this is my he's almost five now but yeah we're just picking some of our fall vegetables don't harvest the plants if it's below freezing many of these plants can be perfectly fine outside while it's freezing but then don't bring them and put them in the fridge for a few days before you cook them pick them right before you're going to cook them if you bring them in and let them thought rapidly they're going to disintegrate right so you want to pick them and then eat them or pick them when it's above freezing you know when it slowly come above free or you can preserve it so don't be fooled by appearances especially with cabbage cabbage can have some pretty nasty looking outer leaves but yeah peel back a couple and inside you might find a pretty good head okay so don't be put off by appearances do a little digging and you know understand that this is produce that's been out for months out in the field right so it's not going to be supermarket quality because they'll call that stuff but it's perfectly edible perfectly safe as long as you follow standard practice and stay positive don't be hard on yourselves people don't garden in the winter a lot for a reason it's not necessarily easy and there's if you get a nasty winter you know you might be out of luck if you end up having a light winter you could do particularly well so those things unless you control the weather in which case please come talk to me if you don't control the weather you can't control the weather and if you have a bad winter it's you know stay positive look at it as an experiment right this is go into it as an experiment and remember that negative results are still results if something didn't work one year well maybe try something else the next year okay so infrastructure yay this is one of my favorites because you get to talk about stuff you can put in and on your garden so we've already prepped our soil we've picked good varieties so we're already you know started early enough in the year that they're all good eating harvesting quality or big enough at least to make it through for the spring so now talk about protecting so don't overuse infrastructure too much in the fall right so if I'm putting row covers on and getting everything nice and toasty in September, October well then my plants they become weak right like they might think oh this isn't September this is in October this is August and you know September I'm gonna put on lots of growth this is still early enough in the season and then when it gets really cold they're like oh why is it December all of a sudden so let them start to cold just like you harden off your spring plant outs you need to kind of harden off your winter plant outs let them get into cold if it's you know a light frost on your cabbage that's not gonna kill them let them get that a couple of times to kind of start to acclimatize them and then as it starts getting colder then start adding these things to them to keep them to you're basically just trying to trim those extra cold temperatures off them rather than protect them like a helicopter gardener the entire winter and also be careful on sunny mild days right you have a well this year what what was it 75 on Christmas I don't remember but it was warm it was pretty warm so you don't want to have all these row covers on and then you have a rogue 60 degree day in December and then you bake all your plants my first winter where I over wintered a lot of cabbage I lost so much of my started cabbage for the next spring because it was a hot day and I forgot and I ran out there in the evening I was like oh no and I pulled it up and I just smelled like melted cabbage because it all just wilted it was like too hot and it all died so make sure to ventilate and remove on those rogue hot days which we're getting more of it seems like also you want to avoid another warning avoid cross ventilation so when we look at row covers which are long kind of tubes if you keep both ends open you might get a wind passing through there and that's just gonna suck the heat right out you want to keep ventilation slow and seeping rather than blowing or moving quickly because that pulls too much heat or even coolness away from the plants and don't forget to water they're still alive right so they still need to be watered and when you have an impermeable cover I'll show some row covers that are plastic you'll need to water under them especially on a warmer day where it's fine to be opening them up the bigger the cover the better it needs to be secured against the wind I was two miles north of that tornado I mean why should I be surprised it's February there should be tornadoes but you want to have everything maybe not against the tornado because what can you do but you want to have those winter winds are pretty brutal so make sure that they are well secured and remember that everything that admits light also loses heat at night through radiation so if you have a lot of clear stuff to get that extra little light into your plants make sure that you also are covering it back up at night with something that insulates a little bit to keep that in alright so let's talk about some specific things a cloosh these were there were millions of these around Paris at the turn of the last century and they would these are tiny little bell shaped covers that go on individual plants or groups of small plants so if you can afford these antique beautiful glass do some folks have these? a couple? no they're harder to find and they're expensive but you know what I have a lot of these and you can make and these are nice because they have a little bit of ventilation built in you can make them out of basically anything and these are just little bells that will keep a little extra heat and now these of course will be propped open on hot days they have cloosh you can just put like a little piece of wood tip them up just so they get a little bit more ventilation on hot days so that they don't fry in there you can use cones I've even seen people use those old like dog cones from when after the dog has a surgery I've seen people use those things I don't know why you'd have a lot of those but maybe you're a veterinarian I don't know these are Dutch lights Dutch lights are temporary wooden frames and they support glass panes they're higher in the north I mean this is a double pane but they're higher in the north generally and lower on the south side they can be DIY and this isn't something that's gonna keep 20 below cabbage alive because it's glass but it will give you a couple weeks or maybe even a month or two on the shoulder seasons and these can be made from storm windows things like that if you have a friend in the trades I have a friend in the trades and he's constantly texting me do you need more storm windows I'm like no please stop asking me I have a thousand and a half of them so with the caveat though it's glass and I always warn you anytime you put something glass in your garden there's a reasonable chance it's gonna get broken and you might have to be dealing with glass shards in your garden so just buyer beware on that if you have the money for plexiglass or something like that go for it but for my let's say very cost-effective gardening a.k.a. cheap those glass panes are pretty pretty effective cold frames the more grown-up cousin of Dutch lights you can DIY these with storm windows or full windows hinge along one side create an A frame or you can do it where you're building the sides out of another material you can do it out of straw bales you can do boxes like this you can build little tiny greenhouses these are all could be classified as cold frames right these are built into the side of a house which is great it's getting all of this thermal mass that's storing heat energy during the day also it's shared with the house so it's you know radiating a bit of heat and then here's some yeah these are cement cement on the back to absorb heat and release it at night those look like permanent built-in ones yeah so you can go nuts but they should hug the ground the higher they are the more the heat can rise away from the plants you really only want them high enough to cover the plants for your best performance hotbeds hotbeds are artificially warm soil on a bed of compost and these have kind of fallen out of favor in industrial production back in the day so this is a picture from France they used to do hotbeds all the time because they didn't have ready access to say natural gas to heat up a greenhouse which is what we do now because we would just rather burn the fossil fuel rather than use all this horse manure that's just going to waste back then there were a lot more horses there was a lot more horse manure but they would pile up 18 or so inches of horse manure at the beginning and it would be semi-anerobic so it would be slow to compost but you don't want 160 degrees underneath your plants because it'll burn them but hotbeds are essentially a layer of soil laid on top of a container of manure thick layer of composting manure so you could do 12 to 14 inches for beds that are going to last through the winter or maybe a little more depending on your locations you can also build them above ground but then there's less insulation you can lose a lot of heat out of the sides some people do their starts on compost beds that's certainly a useful way to do it a second use of compost because it has all that heat here we have one that's surrounded by straw and then inside is the manure that's got covers on it so these are all useful ways to do a hotbed you want to make sure you have a good layer of soil because if you're using manure it's going to have potential for bacterial transmission to leafy greens especially if you're eating leafy greens in a more raw state you might not want to do that from a hotbed just out of an abundance of caution my lawyers tell me I have to say that what you do in your own house is up to you but I'm telling you do not eat leafy greens from a hotbed because you might get E. coli I've said it now you do it and you get sick it's on you okay good we're all clear my lawyer's happy my wife's she's like be careful what you say you're telling people to do it no no I'm careful okay yeah plants need to be watered think about this there's extra heat in there so they're going to need a little more water than you think water around midday on a warm day you can combine these of course as pictured here with cold frames Dutch lights row covers et cetera you can even make a custom built greenhouse and I'll show you at the end here a custom built greenhouse to hold these row covers this is pretty good an approachable way to extend your season row covers also called horticultural fleece ag fabric et cetera there's a lot of different names for these you can find them in grower catalogs they're not as common in household gardening catalogs but they should be these row covers are a lifesaver I use tons of them here are some of mine for example one of the first years I did this I used bent that's EMT electrical metal conduit bent into horseshoes and then put over cabbages and things and lots of weeds apparently this was my first year doing it and then I covered them up here with multiple layers of this fabric and they lived all winter long they made it through pretty easily and you can adjust them this was one brain storm I had of doing so you can see piled up mulch on the back to blow cold northern winds off of it dark color and then I had open I would open them up in the morning when I go open up the chickens if it was going to be a reasonable temperature they get some sunlight and then I'd close them up at night and this is the white it's like a horticultural fleece or ag fabric it's what is row covering in for a market gardener it's yeah it's just like a kind of a fleecy white yeah yeah it's like a woven feeling yeah it's permeable it breathes but slowly and then yeah I had clear poly in front and that worked really well the kale the kale did survived all winter and I was just harvesting all winter and this was it and this was it in the spring it survived pretty well others you can use more permeable or more robust covers going into the winter this was just to kind of keep it alive through the winter worked really well so yeah different ways so this is a good diagram to kind of show what I'm doing different ways to do it so they're using those horseshoes to also keep as a wind barrier right to keep the wind from blowing the horticultural fleece away they sell clips that fit right on to half inch EMT some people use PVC I recommend I think the PVC becomes too brittle even if it's bent already once it gets to 20 below and then gets hit by a hard wind they can shatter I haven't had that happen to my EMT I don't want to be in the winter storm that crushes my metal conduit that would be pretty nasty yeah so they use these kind of clips but you can also buy little plastic clips that hold on special made for that you could do a couple of layers you could do one layer here and then put more a slightly larger piping and then another layer then you'd get an air layer between them that'd be really good yeah so row covers are great poly tunnels are also nice and they don't have to be a big high hoop house that you invest in these can be you can just get what's it called it is the tension wire for so if you go to Menards or any other store that sells chain link fence there's something called tension wire it comes in these big spools and it's pretty big gauge galvanized wire and then you can just cut through it and then bend them out and then you have these pretty strong enough hoops of galvanized wire that you can then use like this to make little hoop houses and then you can get different types of plastic through egg suppliers for market gardeners or things like that and then you can make these small poly tunnels and you don't have to go nuts like this is a market gardener right that's their job this is I'm not suggesting that you all go do this this winter but you can do it on a small scale you can make a small one to keep things going a little longer and then you can add on to that right these it doesn't have to be just one thing so you can have this during the day and then you pull a row cover over it at night so it does take more work but you can certainly get a lot out of it and if it's not getting sunny you don't have to uncover them just leave them be walls and terraces this is a bit more of a infrastructure if you want to go for it but you know if this was facing the south this would be a really warm growing environment and you could build little covers and stuff into these infrastructure things so just part of the built environment of your garden greenhouses now obviously greenhouses quite an investment this is my greenhouse now I'm kidding this is called the jewel box it's in St. Louis it was built for the 1904 World's Fair so that they could bring up all kinds of tropical plants and things my wife and I actually got married in that we saved a ton on buying flowers I got this full of flowers and it's beautiful so they were actually invented in Roman times Emperor Tiberius needed cucumbers for medical reasons and Pliny the Elder talks about how they created a greenhouse to grow cucumbers in Rome quite a long time ago the 1200s in the Vatican they kept getting gifts from across Christendom and so they built a greenhouse 1400s Korea they built greenhouses with heated wooden or heated on the stone floors that they'd light a fire and it would pass the smoke through the floor and it would heat up really cool but they weren't really widespread outside of royal or very wealthy environments until the 1600s in Europe for market gardens and so it's a big investment and these are obviously like for market gardeners or folks who are doing this as their job but you can get pretty small economical greenhouses and even in the greenhouses I still have to cover my plants but I get an extra month on either side of the growing season really and yeah it adds then I only have a couple of months that I need to gap with extra measures inside and there are things you can do like insulation plastic glazing isn't a real good insulator even though my high tunnel will get up to like the 70s when it's even like 35 degrees outside at night it gets down just as cold as everything else because all that heat gets lost as radiation so if I covered it it would keep a lot of that in you can have a double wall active blower this is a bit of an expensive thing where you have two layers of plastic and there's a blower keeping an air pocket in there that provides quite a lot of insulation you can add thermal walls so these are big black big black metal containers full of water on the southern excuse me northern wall of more climate controlled greenhouse but these absorb solar radiation all day and then at night they release that heat back and they will just really if the temperatures are going like this it will just kind of smooth them out a bit you can do a manure composting and I'm gonna show you this one later on but basically this whole back northern wall these are each one of these is a cubic yard container for horse manure and that's producing a lot of heat that is then circulating through blowers into this it's a really cool greenhouse I'll show you that in a bit then there's things like active heating so this is a mass heater that you fire it here and then all the smoke goes through all of this masonry before it leaves and that deposits a lot of the heat so the temperature coming out of here is like 120 degrees so that means all those BTUs are staying in the greenhouse you can do something like an earth tube the earth stays constant if you get down far enough and if you have a long enough pipe and a blower you can be blowing 55 degree air in for the cost of just running a blower motor all winter long growing doors again I'm not really gonna get too deep into this but if you're already heating your house which most of us do you could be gardening in there or you could be growing something or at least keeping things alive I have a lot of stuff in my root cellar that I bring in like figs I keep my citrus and my southern windows are basically chock a block with plants right now citrus and things like that you could also do things like microgreens for a lot of the same green nutritional stuff especially if you're saving your own seeds you have a surplus of seeds that you can eat potted plants yeah keep those southern windows full I'm not gonna get into like real hydroponic or anything where you're starting and keeping it inside forever but there's a lot of really pretty options out there that are nicer than what I have well they're getting nicer because my wife says can you make this look a little nicer I like all the green but I don't wanna feel like I'm living outside all right so now let's turn let's see what time we're done okay good so I'll get through a couple of case studies I don't have time for questions or discussions maybe folks here have some other suggestions so these are case studies these are more like kind of inspiration rather than go out and do it right now unless you want to which would be really cool let me know if you do because I'd love to share what you do anyway so these are Chinese greenhouses these were developed in the 1980s and these have had various iterations over the years but basically they're all kind of the same idea they have a masonry or a soil rammed earth back northern wall that absorbs heat during the day I guess these more so and then they have this kind of half an arch going forward and then what these look like are they're large and they grow tons of green leafy vegetables all winter for cities in China there's yeah they have these they mass produce these arch lattice covers and then they're covered with what do you call it greenhouse film and then at night they have rice straw mats because that's what they have available but you could use any sort of matting or I use tarps a couple of tarps layered together on mine which I'll show you in a minute whoops and they build yeah they have the infrastructure built up and then they just add the perishable stuff and then you can grow vining stuff on the back wall and quite a lot because these trellis roofs can take strings attach them so you can do tomatoes in the summer yeah so it's an interesting variation on a greenhouse if you're building a greenhouse and you're interested in turning it into a four-season greenhouse having that back wall it's not like you're getting the sun through the northern wall anyway this is a really interesting adaptation that might not be significantly depending on how handy you are how significantly more expensive you could also build a greenhouse of that same configuration with the drums on the backside instead of the masonry you would do the same thing so yeah there's again this will be on the website so you can find these resources but if you google for a Chinese greenhouse the University of Minnesota actually has grants for growers to build them in sorry in Minnesota so if you happen to be a market gardener from Minnesota you can check that out but yeah there's a lot of really cool resources for that so this is mine I built this few years ago as a wallopini which is an in-ground greenhouse mine's semi-in-ground I had to dig it out to make it in the ground but it is built of earth bags which are grain bags I spent grain bags from like Hophouse and Wisconsin Brewing Company that I filled with a mixture of clay, straw, lime and wood chips and then packed kind of like a retaining wall to go as to hold up the interior so this is the trench where the wall would go and then I built that all the way up as you can see here and here's the roof being put on and it is supposed to absorb the sunlight in the winter onto that back wall and then it would be a four-season greenhouse in the ground I'd change the roof I'd do some alterations on this but here it is in the spring and here it is here's the backside of it with a thermal mass and windows there because I got tired of doing and so here is an unheated so some winters I heat it I'll show you how and other winters I don't so this is the temperature graph from last year's February to this year's or I guess last so this is last winter this is not this winter so here is freezing about here so it does dip below freezing but it doesn't here's 23 degrees so it never got below 23 degrees that was the coldest it got in there with that was with no heat with no artificial heat and I do cover it I've got a rolling cover so it opens up to get some sun in the winter and then it goes back down I do have a mass heater in there so this is when it's running and I just burn scrap wood in there so it's not like I'm buying in wood to burn in there and it doesn't burn much I just keep it above freezing I even have like a sensor in there as you can see because I have the data and it pings my phone if it gets down to 36 degrees I go out there I start a fire and it's fine for the night even like even well below zero it's perfectly fine and I have and I would start these plants outside and then bring them in and I can start things in here really early so a bit more infrastructure but you know this is just kind of case to just to give you some idea of what's out there you can find a whole video with I apologize really annoying music on YouTube or on our website lowtechsatute.org I do apologize for the music just please turn it down you can see me almost lose an eye plastering it okay orange is in Kansas this is a really neat guy and he builds these greenhouses and sells kits and he grows citrus in for sale in Kansas and he digs these things deep into the ground and he sells kits called greenhouse in the snow so you can Google greenhouse in the snow and they'll come up but yeah kits and you can build them however long you want however big you want and yeah so he's growing oranges and lemons all winter long really beautiful interior you know if you wanted to get something off the shelf there's the shelf the end new alchemy institute was kind of like what I aspire to be they had a whole bunch of researchers working in the 1970s on things like hydroponics and really ahead of their time agricultural research this was like during the oil crisis that I heard happened in the 70s I wasn't there yet or aware of gas and so these are bio shelters that they designed and built and so these are houses on the north side and then on the southern side they have large absorbent windows with basically a working ecosystem they've got water with fish and all kinds of plants and animals living in the water and grow beds and they're all interconnected there's some really great videos on YouTube that you could check out that show of them working and so this is when they were being built in like the 70s how they were getting installed and this is one still functioning today they built one on Prince Edward Island in Canada and it was a passively heated arc in PEI oh here it is and this was like running just on solar heat in Prince Edward Island which isn't the coldest part of Canada but it's still plenty cold yeah so you can check that out Cape Cod Ark you can't see the video it didn't capture when I tried to screen grab it but if you go to Cape Cod Ark on YouTube there's a walkthrough of it it's really cool yeah and this is the compost greenhouse this was actually the inspiration for a compost study that I did this last year it is a greenhouse with bays for horse manure in the back and then there's blowers it's an aerated static pile so you never have to turn this compost it blows fresh air through the compost and or through the horse manure and compost it without any turning and then it takes the carbon dioxide heat and moisture and pushes it into grow beds to make the grow beds warm yeah really great and so what I tried to do with my study was to make this modular so market gardeners could put it in in the winter and then take it out unfortunately I think you don't have enough control over the variables you need to build a custom built one but it's pretty cool if you have access to horse manure go for it yeah so here it is from the side you can see the horse manure there's a blower to blow CO2 the plants love the CO2 and then the heat rises up into this bed the heat gets blown into this bed and then the H2O, the CO2 get blown through corrugated tube up through a wood chip bed which has a lot of beneficial bacteria to convert all the any nitrites into nitrates or vice versa and then it goes into the plants yeah it's really clever and they got tons of winter vegetable winter gleefy greens they were actually getting growth put on in that but most people can't expect that so this is what we built this was a bladder that would capture all that moisture and send it through a grow bed but it wasn't working I did get good compost I have tons of good compost out of this but this was our bladder system that we built but I'm not going to get too deep into it because it was a negative or negative results are still results alright so that's the end of what I have but I'm very happy to entertain questions or comments what's been working for you growing in the winter so thank you very much alright any questions yes that's true horses have yeah horses have less complete digestion and so yeah there you do get more pass through of seeds and things like that but there's more to compost they compost really well because it has a lot more let me refer so you want for composting you want a 30 to one or 25 to one nitrogen to carbon ratio right horse manure with bedding is almost perfect it's 25 to one as you scoop it out of the stable and so you can throw it right in the bin it's really it's really nice that way if it's straw bedding as if it's wood chip bedding it's a little off but horse manure or cow manure then you have to add a lot of nitrogen to it excuse me you have to add a lot of carbon to it because it's more nitrogen concentrated so perfectly fine to use horse manure or cow manure basically whatever you have access to is what you should use yeah there's handouts up here if you want to grab any on the way out don't be shy other questions folks here yeah so good question let the soil itself be your guide the question was how often should you be watering in the winter and it's really dependent because the weather's more variable and the water needs and we're variable in the winter so use your fingers into the soil and see is it damp you can probably wait if it's dry water yeah that's basically it especially again do it on a warm sunny nice day yeah other questions all around no you're fine you're fine I'm sorry I didn't mean to make you duck yeah first time you know when you're growing yeah the you said the fat you're talking soil cap it's not it's covered right so the bed temperature yeah preferably you keep your soil from freezing yeah right because then it can continue uh biological activity frozen some plants can survive with frozen ground but if you can keep it from freezing that's idea that's better um yeah but a lot of plants can deal with cold air temperatures but if their roots freeze they die but if their air temp yeah like cabbage is fine with the ground if the air freezes yeah sorry question back there oh negative 20 night depends I mean yeah I mean you're gonna have to experiment what works for your place for me for me to get through negative 20 and are we talking just like at night it's negative 20 then it warms up or are we talking like three days negative 20 because these are all different things it's also variable but you know the the more mulch if it's gonna be really cold I might like shovel snow on top of it because that's insulative too you know like and usually there's snow there when it's negative 20 and I would shovel it on if it's light snow or maybe I would get some uh you know extra tarps and put it over it just anything to keep or spread straw over and then cover it I mean whatever you can do but then I forgot to mention straw and other mulches also can harbor uh mice and things like that so you might even think about my mousetraps because I've certainly had mouse eaten cabbage and stuff like that and then I put mousetraps in there so yeah yeah thank other questions comments concerns yeah just mousetraps usually or garter snakes I'm just kidding they don't they they don't live in the winter but yeah mouse I I'm not against using uh you know some people will put out the pellets that they eat that that works perfectly fine I use the mousetraps because I like to feed the mice to my chickens same thing uh traps yeah uh but yeah pellets I will use I if it's getting real bad I'll use chemicals but I try not to peanut butter is what I usually use I haven't had a trap for voles uh but I know other people use mouse traps and vole traps with a lot of success but yeah for me for mice it's always peanut butter because it sticks on there it works real well for me straw bales uh-huh voles love straw it's that yeah I like straw for my potatoes but then the voles get in it and they destroy my potatoes so the potatoes produce tubers but then the might the voles eat them so all right thanks guys and that's where we wrapped up next time we'll be back in Cooksville in the year 2100 looking at compressed air stay tuned that's it for this week the low tech podcast is put out by the low technology institute this show is hosted and produced by me Scott Johnson the episode was recorded in the low tech recording booth in Cooksville Wisconsin subscribe to the podcast on itunes spotify googly youtube and elsewhere we hope you enjoyed the free podcast if you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do please consider going to patreon.com slash low tech institute and signing up thanks to our forester and land steward level members the handvices for their support the low technology institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members grants and underwriting you can find out more information about the low technology institute membership and underwriting at of course lowtechinstitute.org find us on social media you can reach me directly i'm scott at lowtechinstitute.org our intro music was first snow off the album winter lo-fi from holisna that song is in the public domain and this podcast is under the creative commons attribution and share like license meaning you're free to use it and share it as long as you give us credit thanks so much for listening and take care