An early start on gardening! Enjoy these extended gardening tips from seasoned gardener Tom Elmore.

It's "winter farming" season--the bugs and diseases are far away. The catalogs tempt us with page after page of incredible descriptions. Anything is possible for next year--melons, cukes, peppers, and of course tomatoes! Once the seed orders are mailed, frustration sets in. It's four whole months until the last frost.

This could be the season that winter only lasts a month, or disappears altogether. A range of options exists for the enthusiastic gardener who wants to stretch the season. In our region, year round salad and stir-fry greens are easily accomplished. With a heated greenhouse, even tomatoes. Let's look at our options from least costly to most expensive.

First, pick vegetables that love cold weather. No traditional mountain garden is put to bed for the winter without a section in mustard. Kale, collards, and spinach will winter over without protection most years. In the Johnny's Seeds catalog (see Resources below), look for the snowflake icons indicating cold-hardy crops. One of the most amazing greens in our winter garden is claytonia, or miner's lettuce. It freezes solid at night and keeps growing the next day. It bolts when temperatures go up into the fifties, but even the flowers are good. So the least cost option is to remember to order winter greens and to remember to plant them in August and September.

The next more elaborate step in season extension is to cover the crop during cold weather. Hardware store clear plastic is inexpensive but it usually breaks down quickly from exposure to sun. Greenhouse polyethylene is more expensive, but can last ten years or more. A plastic covering must be removed or at least vented on sunny days, or overheating will damage your plants Row cover is a generic term for a gauze-like geotextile that breathes during warmer weather and turns solid below freezing as frost forms. Row cover is only removed for harvest since rain passes through it. Probably the best combination is row cover down to the mid-twenties and a sheet of plastic over the row cover for even lower temperatures.

A logical next step is adding hoops to bold the plastic or row cover off the crop. Supports range from wire hoops a loot or so high to pipe hoops that create a walk-in space. Local author Jeff Ashton's book (see Resources below) does a great job of describing several approaches to small-scale structures. The simplest approach is probably using wire hoops. Farm supply stores offer a variety of sizes. Nine gauge or thicker wire is best, which we cut in five to six foot lengths. An 18x96-foot hoop house can be built for under a thousand dollars but shorter versions under a hundred dollars are possible. Greenhouse supply houses offer many choices of both greenhouse hoops and complete packages.

To add still more convenience, environmental control (and expense) the enthusiastic season extender can add vents, power vents, fans, and heaters. Vents can be operated by hand, with solar pistons, or by electric devices. This feature protects your plants from overheating and allows the grower to occasionally leave home on days with variable weather. Thermostatically controlled attic fans are available at building centers for under $50. Large fans are typically used to vent larger hoop houses. An electric heater may work to keep small structures above damaging temperatures during extreme low temperatures. To maintain higher temperatures or to heat larger spaces, propane, natural gas or wood heat probably will be necessary.

While not widely used in the United States, hundreds of acres of passive solar greenhouses were built in China. Site-made bricks form the walls on the east, west and south.

Plastic covered bamboo or plastic pipes arc from high on the north wall to the ground on the south side. Rice straw mats are rolled over the plastic as insulation on cold nights. Brick beds in the greenhouse add to the thermal mass and reduce temperature swings. This system is labor-intensive but the propane truck does not leave a bill every few weeks.

This is prime winter farming season. Plan now for early spring crops and a harvest that lasts all next winter. Fresh salad greens just a few steps from your door are hard to beat unless of course you consider ripe tomatoes in May.

Thanks to the Organic Growers School for supplying this article! Tom Elmore is one of the speakers at the upcoming Growers School.

RESOURCES:

The Organic Growers School includes three sessions on season extension and greenhouses. It will be March 15, 2003 at Blue Ridge Community College in Flat Rock NC and is described on the web at http://main.nc.us/cfsa_mountains/ogs/

Johnny's Selected Seeds at www.johnnyseeds.com or phone at [phone].

The 12-Month Gardener: Simple Strategies for Extending Your Growing Season by Jeff Ashton, Lark Books, 2001.

Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman, Chelsea Green, 1992.

The Winter-Harvest Manual by Eliot Coleman is available directly from Four Season Farm at RR Box 14 Harborside ME 04642 at $15.

Sonne-Gro in Knoxville, Tennessee at 1-800-766-6347 delivers and ships greenhouse supplies to Western North Carolina.

Ray's Bag Company in Naples, NC sells greenhouse film, shade cloth, ground cloth and row cover by the yard. [phone] or [phone] or www.raysbaginc.com.

North Carolina State University Greenhouse Vegetable website at http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/greenhouse_veg/

Tom Elmore grows organic greenhouse tomatoes with his wife Karen and daughter Elizabeth at Thatchmore Farm in Leicester, NC. Tom and Ray Wheeler of SunRay Enterprises will speak on walk-in structures at the Organic Grower School (see above.)