winter gardening – Brennah's Backyard

Honey Bees in March

For honey bee colonies that have made it through the winter, the month of March can still be a difficult and risky time. Especially towards the beginning of the month, there isn’t much of anything for them to forage on. Despite that hinderance, the bees are busily expanding their brood rearing operation. The colony’s growing new generation requires more resources than what the relatively small (and all fully grown) winter generation needed. If the colony was successful the previous season, this should be no problem; their stores of honey and pollen would be adequate for the job.

Honey bee foraging on flowers from our winter crops — Honey bee grooming pollen off of her antennae, to be collected in her pollen baskets.

But in the case of my colonies, which were started late last year, and then faced a weirdly early start to winter, they were a bit short on pollen, which is especially important for their developing brood. The warmth of spring also came fairly early this year, and so there was plenty of time before anything was blooming outside for the bees to be out and about, looking for something to feed their brood.

honey bee with pollen on tokyo bekana flowers — Honey bee gathering pollen from Tokyo bekana flowers. Tokyo bekana is a very mild green in the mustard family that we grow during the winter.

Meanwhile in the hoophouse many of the winter crops were starting to bolt (produce their flowers), and the warmer temperatures meant that the louvres were open most of the time… So before long, the bees discovered it and were flying in through the louvres to gather pollen from the bolting winter crops. This would have been just fine, if they were able to find their way back out. Unfortunately, although they were very clever about navigating their way in, when they decide it is time to return to the hive, they tend to try to fly towards the sun, rather than retracing their path. I guess maybe they need to orient themselves for a while before they can pick out their route home? However it works, the result was that with just the louvres open, most of them couldn’t find their way out, and with the sides also opened up, some of them still found themselves stuck in the corners. (Bumble bees don’t have this problem… they seem to be extremely good navigators. They’ll fly into a corner occasionally, but usually after trying unsuccessfully to escape for a minute they just go off and try another way.)

Honey bees foraging on flowers from our winter crops

My response to this was to gather flowers from the bolting plants and arrange them in what I hoped would be a tempting display not too far from the hives (but also not too close, because that can lead to robbing, sometimes) and to catch bees that got in the hoophouse and brush them out of the corners.

Honey bees foraging on flowers from our winter crops

The bees seemed to appreciate having a nearby patch of flowers to forage on, but some of them would still start flying into the hoophouse on the warmest days. One day toward the end of March, I noticed very few bees getting into the hoophouse despite it being a warm sunny day, and there were fewer on the patch by the hives. Finally, something else was flowering for them… but what was it? I didn’t see them on the hazelnut catkins that were just starting to open. Hazelnuts are wind pollinated and offer only pollen, which they would have gone for if something wasn’t offering them a better deal. It turned out to be the silver maples back in the woods.

Silver maple flower (I don’t have pictures of the bees on the flowers because most of the flowers were way up above what I could reach, and I actually had to trek quite a ways just to find a tree with a low hanging branch with flowers I could photograph. The bees, meanwhile, probably don’t find it worth their while to come down there much when most of the flowers are up high.)

So now, as more things join the silver maples (willows are also starting to open their catkins now), the colonies will start to grow, and turn their attention toward their next season, which is the swarming season.

Pollen dusted honey bee hanging from a willow catkin

Spring in the Hoophouse

It is getting very close to spring, both by the calendar and otherwise. But in the hoophouse, it is already spring. To be specific, I’d say it is around the beginning of April in there. The hoophouse is unheated, so it goes through seasonal temperature cycles just like the rest of the landscape, but it goes through somewhat different temperature cycles. It tends to warm up quicker during the day, especially if it is sunny (on sunny days the temperature difference can be extreme, but there are louvres that open automatically at a set temperature to moderate extremes). At night, though, it can get almost as cold as outside (but at least it is sheltered from wind and snow).

purple deadnettle (lamium purpureum) — Purple dead-nettle in between spinach leaves

The fact that it isn’t just consistently a little bit warmer inside the hoophouse seems like it would make estimating the equivalent season difficult, if not impossible. But I realized, a couple years ago now, that I don’t have to figure it out; the weeds growing in the hoophouse had already done that. Because of my ‘photojournaling’ observations, I had pictures of when different plants flowered, or went to seed or fruited (or even just when they started coming up). So all I had to do was look at what the plants were doing, and see when they had been in the same stage outside in previous years.

At first, I wondered if the results would be consistent. Would all the individual observations, taken together, all point to the same time frame? Or would different plants handle the seemingly non-equivalent conditions in different ways? But it turned out they did all point to the same time frame. So, I figured, if the plants in the hoophouse were doing what they would do in March (for example), I could plant crops that would be planted outside in March in this area, and they should do well. That has seemed to work pretty well, and gave a method to follow for figuring out when to plant what in the spring even when we were new at growing in a hoophouse.

These flies definitely seem to think it’s spring

Maché and Other Winter Greens

Maché

Maché is one of the most cold hardy salad greens one can grow. They didn’t get planted this year, but that didn’t stop them from coming up anyway, since some of the plants in the above photo (taken late January 2018) went to seed.

Maché in the salad bowl. (Taken on November 23, 2017, this was probably one of our first maché harvests, and everything else in the salad was also from our hoophouse garden.)

The main reason the maché didn’t get planted this year was because we were all too busy trying to keep the rodents away from some of the earlier winter crops that had been planted. Here’s a look at a few of the more intentionally planted crops in the hoophouse right now:

A romaine type lettuce variety called 'winter density' — A romaine type lettuce variety called ‘winter density’

Cool Weather Crops

Fall can be a very productive time for the garden. All the cool weather crops we’ve planted for winter are reaching maturity now, and it hasn’t yet become cold enough to kill the warm weather crops (which right now is mostly just tomatoes, since we weren’t able to plant much for summer due to the flooding this spring). Most of the cool weather crops we planted should continue to be harvestable into winter, and although options are fairly limited now, there are still seeds that can be planted. For the most part, though, plants grow very slowly during the dead of winter, so it is important to have most of what you want to be eating in the winter pretty much full size by late fall.

endive and escarole — Endive and escarole, but which is which is confusing with these varieties since they both look more typical of the other type… but it doesn’t matter too much, as they taste similarly. They are both the same species and are actually a type of chicory.

mustard green leaf — The frilly edge of a mustard leaf.

This is Tokyo bekana, a plant in the mustard family that is mild enough to use like lettuce.

The purple veins of a variety of flowering broccoli

tomato flowers — Most of the tomatoes around just came up on their own, and this one came up pretty close to winter, but nobody wants to just pull it out…

First Harvest

Over the last month, we’ve been working on planting crops for the fall and winter. Now we’re starting to be able to harvest our first greens from our efforts, but they aren’t the ones we planted! Those ones are still coming along, but aren’t ready yet. The plants we’ve been harvesting are weeds. Many of the weeds that commonly pop up in gardens are actually edible and nutritious, and if you know which ones they are, they can add variety to the harvest (and make it come sooner as most of them are very quick growing and are best harvested young). Here’s a look at what we’re harvesting.

Amaranth

Amaranth is not just a weed, it is a plant that is often grown as a crop, but it also grows wild and is often treated as a weed when it does. We have a wild variety, and we also have a variety that is a cultivar that has probably crossed with the wild variety, and just pops up in the chicken yard now (and wherever the soil from the chicken yard goes, like our garden).

This red amaranth is the descendant of a cultivar.

Wild mustard

This is one of our most prevalent weeds and as a stronger green, much more comes up than we can eat. Fortunately, the chickens love it, and we like to share it with them. Especially in the winter when greens are scarce, wild mustard growing in our hoophouse (along with bittercress and some greens from our crops) helps satisfy their constant appetite for greens.

honey bee in flight over wild mustard — Honey bee flying over wild mustard. Bees like to forage on the flowers of wild mustard, and it often blooms fairly late into the fall.

Wild Spinach (chinopodium album)

This plant has a lot of common names, many of which are also used for other unrelated plants. In other words, the common names of chinopodium album are a bit of a disorganized mess. I like wild spinach since it is fairly descriptive (it is related to spinach, although technically it is more closely related to quinoa), and I’ve never heard anything else being called that. Other names I’ve heard this plant called are goosefoot, lamb’s quarters, fat hen, and pigweed (this name is also applied to amaranth).

chinopodium album leaf — Young wild spinach leaf with mineral salt secretion. Young leaves look powdery, but with an extreme close up like this, it looks almost like water drops or little marbles.

Unexpected harvests

It may have been a little slow in coming this year, but winter is finally bringing some real cold. And by real cold, I mean that the temperature is taking regular dips below zero degrees (Fahrenheit). At this point, most people aren’t thinking about their gardens, and what they could harvest from them tonight. There are a number of possibilities if you have a hoophouse or cold frame. If not, though, the options are extremely limited. One is a plant most people have never heard of (machè). The only other that I know of, is thyme. To be harvestable in this weather, a plant has to not only still be alive, but also be able to be harvested while the plant is actually frozen, without turning into mush when it is brought into the house and thawed. Most plants’ leaves wilt while they are frozen and revive once the temperature rises above freezing as long as they are still connected to the living plant. (This is part of what having a cold frame or hoophouse helps with; the sun usually warms the interior to at least a little above freezing each day, allowing for the plants to actually be harvested). Thyme leaves don’t even wilt when they are frozen.

Like thyme, maché can be harvested when frozen. We grew it in the hoophouse last year as a salad green. A little has reseeded this year. It has a floral or nutty flavor, depending on who you ask. (Floral is my description.)

We are expecting even colder weather tomorrow, and the outside thyme may get to the point where it more closely resembles dried thyme than fresh, but it will not turn to mush. Sage is similar, and can be harvested when frozen, but gets dried much sooner than thyme.

(And the thyme in the hoophouse will still be green, as long as the voles don’t get to it.)

Thyme poking out of the snow. This is after things got truly cold.

Winter Garden Volunteers

I didn’t get to planting greens for winter in the hoophouse this year. Exactly when they need to be planted depends on the specific crop, but even the quickest growing greens (like spinach) shouldn’t be planted later than September in this area. (At least, they shouldn’t be planted later if you want them for harvesting over the winter. They’ll still grow, but they won’t be ready until spring.)

Radish growing on a path in the hoophouse.

Last year, I planted quite a variety of things in the hoophouse to see what would do well over winter. It was our first year having it and was one huge experiment, but it went pretty well for the most part. Some favorites were identified, as were some that seemed more trouble than they were worth. And then there were some that seemed worth a little extra trouble. This year, though, I had to give my bees top priority. For that and various other reasons I didn’t end up planting much in the hoophouse for this winter. But as I was looking around inside it recently, I noticed that there were a few different greens and other vegetables growing amongst the weeds. There were radishes, mizuna, lettuce, Tokyo bekana, chard, maché, mustard greens, leeks, and what appeared to be a Tokyo bekana/mizuna cross. I had left some of the plants we had been eating over the winter go to seed to collect seeds from in the spring. I’m sure some of them ripened and fell early, or late, or just got missed, and wound up on the ground.

Sorrel, a perennial plant, growing in the hoophouse

That accounts for most of what is growing out there. A small amount of it I did plant, and some of it is perennial plants that were planted last year. Eventually, the hoophouse will probably be full of mostly perennials, but some of the very best cold tolerant winter crops are annuals, so there will always be a place for them too.