Category Archives: Garden Advice

Garden Advice

Winter Spinach Production

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In the Southeast, it’s tough to grow cold-loving, heat-sensitive crops like spinach during the spring. Too quickly, the spring showers give way to summer heat and humidity, and the spinach bolts. Thankfully, we can enjoy spinach right through the winter with a bit of care. These tips will help you grow winter spinach like a pro.

Why Grow Winter Spinach?

Spinach grown in frosty weather has the largest and sweetest leaves. Plus, winter-grown spinach is low maintenance. Once it’s established, you won’t have much to do besides occasionally harvest.

Beaujolais Spinach
Beaujolais Spinach

Spinach Varieties for Winter Production

Most true spinach varieties are pretty cold hardy, and we carry a few that are suited to winter production.

Longstanding and Winter Bloomsdale are both great options for overwintering even in cooler climates, withstanding winter lows down to 0°F.

When to Start Winter Spinach

High summer temperatures can prevent germination or kill young spinach seedlings, so in the southeast it’s often ideal to wait a month before you’re first expected frost. 

That said, in cool or mountainous areas, you want to make sure the plants are well established before winter lows halt their growth. When the day length reaches 10 hours per day or fewer, growth is significantly reduced.

Abundant Bloomsdale Spinach (winter spinach)
Abundant Bloomsdale Spinach

How to Start Winter Spinach

Especially in the Southeast, getting winter spinach started in the late summer or fall while temperatures are still hot can be a major challenge. To ensure good germination and seedling growth, you need to keep the soil as cool as possible.

Irrigate often to keep the soil cool and moist. Irrigating with cool water will bring down the soil temperature. It will further decrease as moisture evaporates and draws heat from the soil.

When irrigating frequently, be careful not to make the soil soggy and monitor closely for signs of dampening off. 

If your spinach is in an open bed in fall, sow seed 2-3 times as thick to help the spinach survive grasshoppers.

Maintaining Spinach Through Winter

While some spinach varieties can tolerate temperatures down to 0°F and even getting snowed on, it is best to give them a bit of protection if possible. You can overwinter spinach in a cold frame, low tunnel, or high tunnel.

In the mountains or more northern areas, you can use a combination to help protect spinach more. Plant spinach in a high tunnel, then as the temperatures drop, cover it with frost cloth or low tunnels. 

While growth will slow and eventually halt in the fall or winter, you can still harvest some spinach leaves in the winter. As the day length increases again in February, you will see growth resume. Overwintered spinach makes for an excellent early crop in spring. 

In warmer temperatures, remember to remove or vent your coverings to ensure the spinach doesn’t get too hot. 

Garden Advice

Harvesting and Storing Peppers

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In August, peppers dot the garden like holiday lights. We’re harvesting large sweet bell peppers like Charleston Belles, fiery little hot peppers like Serrano Tampiqueños, and fragrant spice peppers like Trinidad Perfumes. Whatever peppers you’ve grown this year, knowing how to harvest, store, and process your crop will help you make the most out of your peppers. 

When to Harvest Peppers

You can harvest peppers at any color stage, but they aren’t fully ripe until they reach their mature color. Waiting until they are fully ripe increases flavor and nearly doubles the vitamin C content. 

Exactly what color your peppers ripen to depends on the variety. For example. Chiclayo Hot Peppers ripen from light green to light orange while Purple Beauty Sweet Bell Peppers ripen from green to purple to deep red. 

Especially for larger peppers, you may want to use shears or scissors to harvest the peppers. Tugging the fruits off by hand may damage your plant.

Chiclayo Hot Peppers
Chiclayo Hot Peppers

Extending the Harvest

Usually, mature pepper plants are still thriving when fall weather comes to Virginia. To extend our harvest, we cover the plants each night in old sheets or frost cloth during our first one to two weeks of light frosts. 

Then, before the first killing frost, we uproot plants and place the roots in a bucket of water and store in a cool location to extend harvest by one month. 

For fresh use late into the fall, we also like to grow Doe Hill Golden Sweet Bell Peppers. Their fruits keep well.

Storing Peppers

How you process and store your peppers will depend on the variety and what you have planned. 

Fresh Eating

Store any peppers you want to eat fresh in the crisper drawer of your refrigerator. This is also a great place for peppers your waiting to process for canning or freezing. Pickled Peppers

Canning

Peppers are a low acid vegetable, which means to safely can them, you must pressure can them or make incorporate them into an acidic recipe for water bath canning like salsa, hot sauce, or pickled peppers. Always used tested canning recipes from trusted sources. 

Here are a few tested recipes:

Freezing

Peppers are easy to freeze, you can freeze them raw or roast or blanch them first if you want to use them for cooking later in the season.

Here’s how to freeze peppers.

Drying

Drying or dehydrating peppers is a great way to store them. You can dry hot or spice peppers to be ground up for seasoning, or chunks of peppers to rehydrate and cook in soups, sauces, and casseroles. 

Unfortunately, it’s usually too humid to air dry most peppers in the Southeastern United States. For most large peppers, it’s best to use a food dehydrator or dry them in the oven. You need an oven or dehydrator that you can set to 140°F. Higher temperatures will cook the peppers rather than dry them. 

Learn to dry peppers in the oven here.

For some small peppers, you can use thread and needle to sting them for air drying. Typically, this works best if you can hang the strings somewhere hot and dry. An attic, loft, car port, or garden shed may work well.

Garden Advice, Seed Saving

7 Easy Steps to Save Collard Seeds

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Collards (Brassica oleracea var. acephala) are hardy members of the cabbage or Brassicaceae family. They’re more heat-tolerant than cabbage and are typically winter hardy from Virginia southward. They’re a biennial crop, meaning that they flower and produce seed in their second year, but don’t let that intimidate you. Saving collard seeds is a straightforward process. 

Isolate Your Planting

Collards can cross with other brassicas, including cauliflower, kale, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kohlrabi, and other collard varieties. To maintain your collard variety, isolate your planting in the second year of growth. Isolate by 1/8 mile for home use. For pure seed of small plantings, isolate by 1/4 to 1/2 mile.

Note that you can still grow other crops right next to your collards for eating like cabbage and broccoli, just don’t let them flower at the same time.

Collards flowering
Collard flowers

Maintain a Population Size

To maintain genetic diversity and produce quality seed, you’ll need to grow several plants. For viable seed for next season, save from at least five plants. To help maintain a variety over generations, grow 20 to 50 plants. If you’re working with preserving a rare variety, aim to save seeds from 80 plants or more each season. 

Tend Your Collards Through the Winter

As biennials, collards need to grow through the winter to produce seed. How you overwinter your collards will depend on your climate.

Southern Gardens

Collards are winter hardy where temperatures remain above 20°F. Usually, we’ve found that growers in Virginia and further south can grow collards right through the winter with no trouble.

Growers in slightly colder or mountainous areas may also successfully overwinter collards with a bit of winter protection. Growing them in a hoop house or using row cover can help them survive the winter by providing protection from damaging frosts and a few degrees of buffer.

Northern Gardens

In colder climates, barring a heated greenhouse, you will need to vernalize your collard plants in storage. To do this, you dig the entire plant from the garden in fall, getting as many roots as you can. Then, you trim all the leaves off but leave the growing tip intact. Take your newly trimmed plants and replant them in containers filled with moist sand or potting soil. 

Your collard plants don’t need light over the winter, but they need cool, moist conditions. Placing the potted collards into a root cellar was the traditional choice, but an unheated garage, basement, or storage shed may also work depending on your structure and climate. Ideally, collard plants should be kept between 34° and 39°F and between 80% and 95% relative humidity. 

In the spring, replant your collards as soon as the soil can be worked. At maturity, collards are large plants. Replant your collards so that they are 18 to 24 inches apart and in rows 36 inches apart. 

Spring Care

As collards get ready to flower and produce seed, they become large, top-heavy plants. For best results, we recommend staking plants so they don’t flop over. Collards typically thrive in the spring, but if you don’t get a lot of rain, collards benefit from consistent watering. Mulch can be helpful for weed suppression and moisture preservation.

Collards Seed Pods
These collard seed pods are maturing, but aren’t ready to harvest yet.

Harvest Seeds

After flowering, you will notice your collards producing slender green seed pods. The young green seed pods are edible, but aren’t ready for seed saving just yet. They will be ready to harvest when the pods are brown and brittle.

On a dry day once the pods are brown, cut the whole seed top portion of the plants. The pods are delicate at this stage, and it’s easy to spill seeds. Use a drop cloth, tarp, or tote to cut your seed tops over to catch all the seeds.

Cleaning Collard Seeds

As the pods shatter easily, cleaning the seeds is easy. Using your hands or feet, crush or rub the seed tops in a tote or large container. If they’re mature and dry, they break open easily and release the seeds to the bottom of the container. 

Most of the plant material is easy to remove from the surface; it’s light and stays together in large pieces. The small, heavy seeds will drop to the bottom of the container. Remove as much plant material as possible. If desired, you can screen your seeds to remove any additional material.

Storing Collard Seeds

Place your dry seeds into an airtight container. If you see any signs of condensation in the next few days, remove them and lay them flat on a tea towel or similar to finish drying. Store your airtight container of seeds somewhere cool and dark. Collard seeds should remain viable for about 6 years. 

Learn how to complete a simple germination test here.