- 3 days ago
Plant these five vegetables in fall and your winter garden can keep feeding you with very little work. Garlic, spinach, kale, carrots, and lamb’s lettuce are all hardy crops that can sit through frost, snow, and cold nights, often getting sweeter as temperatures drop.
The advice here is practical and grounded in real seasonal gardening: garlic goes in a few weeks before the ground freezes, spinach and kale are sown early enough to make a strong rosette, carrots are left in the soil under a thick mulch, and corn salad or lamb’s lettuce can stay green when lettuce would fail. The video also explains why frost improves flavor, how to match crops to your climate, and when a simple cover or cold frame may help in harsher winters.
It is a simple fall gardening guide for anyone who wants fresh vegetables through the cold months, less dependence on store-bought greens, and a more productive vegetable garden all winter long.
Created for searches around fall gardening, winter garden vegetables, cold-hardy crops, planting garlic in fall, overwintering spinach and kale, storing carrots in the ground, and growing lamb’s lettuce or corn salad. Ideal for gardeners looking for practical vegetable garden tips, seasonal growing advice, and a low-maintenance way to harvest fresh food in winter.
The advice here is practical and grounded in real seasonal gardening: garlic goes in a few weeks before the ground freezes, spinach and kale are sown early enough to make a strong rosette, carrots are left in the soil under a thick mulch, and corn salad or lamb’s lettuce can stay green when lettuce would fail. The video also explains why frost improves flavor, how to match crops to your climate, and when a simple cover or cold frame may help in harsher winters.
It is a simple fall gardening guide for anyone who wants fresh vegetables through the cold months, less dependence on store-bought greens, and a more productive vegetable garden all winter long.
Created for searches around fall gardening, winter garden vegetables, cold-hardy crops, planting garlic in fall, overwintering spinach and kale, storing carrots in the ground, and growing lamb’s lettuce or corn salad. Ideal for gardeners looking for practical vegetable garden tips, seasonal growing advice, and a low-maintenance way to harvest fresh food in winter.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Most folk put their garden to bed in the fall and give it up for dead till spring.
00:04They pull the last tomatoes, they tidy the beds, and they walk away.
00:08And for the whole long winter that ground lies bare and idle, doing nothing, growing nothing,
00:14while they go back to buying their greens in a plastic bag at the store.
00:18And all the while, had they known it, they could have had that same ground feeding them straight through the
00:24cold,
00:24with crops they planted once in the fall and then did not touch again, not to weed, not to water,
00:31not to do a single thing, until they walked out into the snow to gather supper.
00:36I'm going to give you five of those crops today, the ones you plant now and forget all winter,
00:43and the plain reason the cold makes them better instead of killing them.
00:47Stay to the end, for the hardiest one of all is the last, and most folk have never heard of
00:52it.
00:53Now here is the thing that stops most folk, and it is simply not true.
00:58They believe a frost is the end of everything, that the first hard cold kills a plant dead,
01:04so what would be the use of planting in the fall?
01:07And for your tender things, your tomatoes and your beans, that is true enough.
01:12But for a whole set of hardy crops, the cold is not the enemy at all.
01:17The cold is what makes them sweet.
01:20Here is the plain why of it, and it is a wonder.
01:23When a hardy plant feels the frost coming, it floods its own leaves and roots with its own sugars,
01:30for sugar in the sap keeps it from freezing the way salt keeps a road from icing,
01:35a natural antifreeze the plant makes in its own body.
01:39And sugar, of course, is sweetness.
01:41So the very cold that folk think kills these plants is the thing that turns them tender and sweet,
01:48far sweeter than ever they are in the warm season.
01:51A frost-touched green or a cold-dug carrot is a different and a finer thing than the same crop
01:57in summer.
01:58Once you know that, the whole winter opens up to you.
02:01Now, I will be square with you on one thing from the start, for honesty is worth more than a
02:07grand promise.
02:08How hard your own winter runs decides a great deal here.
02:12In a mild country, these five grow bare all winter with no trouble at all.
02:17In a bitter one, some will want a cover thrown over them on the worst nights,
02:22a sheet of row cloth, an old window, a heap of straw.
02:25I will tell you as we go which are the toughest and which want the coddling,
02:30so you can choose by your own cold.
02:33But every one of them takes a frost that would kill a summer crop stone dead,
02:37and that is the whole point.
02:39I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com.
02:43The book is the long version.
02:45If you want it, it is there.
02:47I will not mention it again.
02:50The first, and the one you must get in the ground right about now, is garlic.
02:55Garlic is the great plant-it-and-forget-it crop, the very model of the thing.
03:01You take a head of garlic, break it into its single cloves,
03:04and push each clove into the ground pointed end up, a few inches deep and a hand apart, in the
03:11fall.
03:11Then you lay a good thick blanket of mulch over the bed,
03:15straw or chopped leaves, a few inches of it, and you walk away.
03:20That is all.
03:21It sits there through the whole winter, through the snow and the freeze,
03:25doing its slow, quiet work underground where you cannot see,
03:29and it wants nothing from you at all, no water, no weeding, no tending.
03:35Come spring it rises on its own, and come summer you lift a head of garlic worth ten
03:41of the dry, papery things from the store.
03:43The hardneck kinds in particular are iron-hardy and laugh at the bitterest cold,
03:49and the cold is not merely tolerated by garlic, it is needed,
03:53for a clove must feel a good stretch of winter cold to split into a proper full head.
03:59And when you lift that crop next summer, save back your fattest heads to plant again come fall,
04:05and you need never buy garlic seed again, for it improves to your own ground year upon year.
04:12Get it in the ground a few weeks before your ground freezes hard,
04:15so the roots take hold before winter, and that is the only timing you need mined.
04:21So garlic is not just surviving your winter, it is using it.
04:25Plant it now, forget it, and be fed next summer.
04:30The second is spinach, and winter spinach is one of the great secrets of the cold season garden,
04:37for most folk think only to grow it in spring.
04:40Sown in the fall, while the soil still holds a little warmth,
04:44it comes up and makes a good rosette of leaves,
04:47and then as the days shorten and the cold comes on,
04:51it near stops growing and simply sits, holding, alive and green under the snow.
04:58And here the sweetening works its finest magic,
05:02for a spinach leaf that has taken a few hard frosts turns so sweet and tender,
05:08it is a different vegetable entirely from the flat bagged stuff.
05:12You can pick it leaf by leaf right through the cold,
05:16taking the outer leaves and leaving the heart to carry on.
05:20And in the worst of the cold, a simple cover thrown over it carries it through.
05:25Sow it four to six weeks before your hard frost settles in,
05:30so it has time to make a good rosette of leaves before the cold slows it down,
05:35for a spinach that goes into winter as a tiny seedling
05:39will only sit there small and give you little.
05:43Grow the hardy old winter sorts, not the quick summer kind,
05:47and spinach will feed you green and sweet through the very heart of the winter.
05:53The third is kale, the toughest green there is,
05:57and the cold does two wonderful things to it at once.
06:00Like the spinach, it sweetens, flooding itself with sugar against the freeze.
06:06But kale does one thing more,
06:08and this is the thing folk who dislike kale have never tasted.
06:12The cold makes it tender.
06:15The kale most folk know is the tough, bitter, fibrous summer kind,
06:20and small wonder they turn their noses up at it.
06:24But a kale plant that has stood through frost and snow
06:27turns soft and mild and sweet,
06:30a wholly better thing to eat.
06:33It takes the hard, cold, bare,
06:35no cover needed in most places,
06:38standing green and often snow-dusted when all else is gone.
06:42You pick the lower leaves as you want them,
06:45and it keeps rising from its top,
06:48taking only what you need and leaving the plant to carry on.
06:52So one row of kale feeds you for months and not in one go.
06:57And here is a gift besides,
07:00for if you leave the plant standing,
07:02it will often live clean through to spring
07:05and give you a fresh flush of tender leaves
07:08and sweet yellow flower buds when the warm returns.
07:12The flower buds themselves good eating,
07:15like a little sweet broccoli.
07:17In the very bitterest country,
07:19a cover or a cold frame carries it through the worst snaps,
07:24but in most places it stands bare and green all winter
07:28with nothing at all.
07:30Grow the hardy, old, curly and flat kinds,
07:33and kale will stand in your winter garden
07:36like a faithful soldier.
07:39The fourth is the carrot,
07:41and this is the one that will most change
07:43how you think about your winter,
07:45for it turns the frozen ground itself
07:47into your root cellar.
07:49Here is the trick.
07:51You do not dig your fall carrots and store them.
07:54You leave them right where they grew,
07:57in the ground,
07:58and you heap a thick blanket of mulch over the row,
08:01a good foot of straw or leaves,
08:04before the ground freezes hard.
08:06That mulch keeps the earth from freezing solid,
08:09and down in that unfrozen earth
08:12the carrots keep perfectly,
08:14cold and crisp and getting sweeter by the week,
08:17for the carrot sweetens in the cold
08:20the same as all the rest,
08:22pulling its starch into sugar.
08:24All through the winter you walk out,
08:27pull back the mulch,
08:28and dig a few fresh sweet carrots
08:31as you want them for supper,
08:32and cover the row back over.
08:35The soil is your cellar,
08:37and the cold is your sugar.
08:39Mind you get your carrots sown in good time
08:42in late summer or early fall,
08:44for they are slow to come up
08:46and want a good size on them before the cold,
08:49and a carrot is always sown
08:51right where it is to grow,
08:53never moved,
08:54for its tap root will fork and twist
08:56if you disturb it.
08:58Keep the seed bed damp until it sprouts,
09:01which is the one fussy part of a carrot,
09:03and after that it near grows itself.
09:06A carrot dug sweet
09:08from half-frozen ground in the dead of winter
09:11is one of the quiet glories of this life,
09:14and most folk have never once tasted it.
09:18Now, before I give you the last and heartiest of all,
09:22let me say plainly who gains by you believing
09:25your garden must die in the fall.
09:28The grocer gains,
09:30who sells you the deer-bagged greens
09:32and the plastic sack of carrots all winter long,
09:36flown in from a warm country
09:38half a world away,
09:40limp and costly,
09:41when your own frozen ground
09:43could have grown them sweeter and free.
09:46It is not that anyone schemed it so.
09:49It is only that a bag of greens
09:51sold to you every week
09:53is remembered and sold hard,
09:55and a winter garden you plant once and forget
09:59is a thing no one profits by teaching,
10:02and so it slipped out of the common mind.
10:05No one coordinated it.
10:07It just rolled on by itself
10:09until folk came to believe,
10:11against all the old wisdom,
10:14that winter is a season of nothing,
10:16a dead stretch to be waited out
10:19rather than a larder to be drawn upon.
10:22Your great-grandmother would have thought
10:24that a strange and wasteful notion
10:26to let good ground lie idle half the year
10:30and pay the store
10:31for what it could have grown.
10:33And now the fifth,
10:36the hardiest of them all,
10:37and the one near nobody has heard of,
10:40which is a little green called mash,
10:43or corn salad,
10:44or lamb's lettuce.
10:46This is the toughest salad green
10:49in all the world,
10:51bar none.
10:52Where a lettuce would turn to black slime
10:54at the first hard freeze,
10:57mash sits out the bitterest cold
10:59under the snow
11:00and comes through sweet and tender and whole,
11:04a little rosette
11:05of soft, muddy leaves
11:07you would swear no frost could touch.
11:10The old market gardeners of Europe
11:13lived on it through the winter
11:14when nothing else green would grow.
11:17You sow it in the fall,
11:19thick,
11:19for the plants are small,
11:21barely cover the little seeds,
11:23and it comes up
11:24and makes its low rosettes
11:26and then simply waits out the winter,
11:29green through the worst of it,
11:31asking nothing.
11:32You cut a whole rosette
11:34at the base
11:35when you want a salad,
11:36the way you would cut
11:37a small head of lettuce,
11:38and there is fresh green
11:40on your winter table
11:41when your neighbors have none.
11:44It wants almost nothing of you,
11:46only a bit of light
11:47to sprout the tiny seed,
11:49so barely cover it,
11:51and a fall sowing
11:52a few weeks before the cold.
11:54And like the hardy things,
11:56it often seeds itself about
11:58and comes back on its own
12:00the next year,
12:01a free green that plants itself.
12:05If you grow one new thing
12:07from this whole list,
12:08grow this,
12:09for it will astonish you.
12:12My grandmother thought
12:13nothing of all this,
12:15for to her it was not
12:16a clever trick,
12:17but simply how a garden was kept.
12:20She had greens and roots
12:22coming out of the cold ground
12:23all winter,
12:24from her kale and her mosh
12:26and her buried carrots,
12:28and she never once thought
12:29she was doing anything
12:31out of the ordinary.
12:32I remember asking her,
12:34a boy stamping the snow
12:36off my boots,
12:37how there could be
12:38anything green to cut
12:40when the whole world
12:41was white and dead.
12:43She said,
12:44The world is not dead, child,
12:46it is only resting,
12:48and the hardy things rest
12:50with their eyes open.
12:51The tender things sleep,
12:54but the tough old faithful ones
12:56just slow down and wait,
12:58and they will feed you
12:59the whole while
13:00if you only plant them in time.
13:03It took me years
13:05to understand
13:05that she had the whole
13:07of cold season gardening
13:08in that one plain sentence.
13:11Plant the hardy things in time,
13:13and the winter is not your enemy.
13:16It is your larder
13:17and your sugar both.
13:19Now tell me this in the comments.
13:22Have you ever grown a thing
13:24clean through the winter before?
13:26Or have you always put the garden
13:28to bed in the fall
13:29like everyone else?
13:30And tell me as well
13:32how cold your winters run
13:34on the hardest nights,
13:36your lowest temperature.
13:37For that decides
13:39which of these five
13:40you can grow bare
13:41and which will want
13:42a cover thrown over them.
13:44And I would know
13:45which of you
13:46has the mild winter
13:47and which the fierce one.
13:49Next time,
13:50I will show you
13:50the simple cold frame,
13:52the glass-topped box
13:53set against a south wall
13:55that takes these very crops
13:57and carries them
13:58through a winter
13:59far harder
14:00than they could bear
14:00in the open,
14:01so that even those of you
14:03in the bitter cold
14:04can eat green all winter.
14:06But for now,
14:08do not put your whole garden
14:09to bed this fall.
14:11Plant these five,
14:12lay on the mulch,
14:13and walk away,
14:14and let the winter feed you
14:16while your neighbors
14:18buy their greens in a bag.
14:20The people who built this country
14:22with their hands knew that,
14:24and we are only just starting
14:26to remember it.