Betty:
I live in Central VA and have a year-round veggie garden. I got my main inspiration from the book Four Season Harvest, by Eliot Coleman. Coleman's in Maine and has to use more extreme protection measures than we do in VA. I think of our mild winters as being spring with a little ice.

The three principal things:
1. Plants won't actively grow much during the winter months, so to get much of a winter harvest, the plants need to be fairly well matured before the cold hits. So it is something of a race to get things to germinate in time especially if late summer and fall are very hot. However, even with late germination, your winter harvest may not be huge but you'll have a splendid head start on spring.

2. Rig up some kind of protection for the winter. Here's what I do: my vegs are in raised beds and I use plastic mesh and stakes to rig up a little fence around each one. This gives me a structure over which I drape row cover. First time around, I used one layer of row cover and during very cold spells or snowfall reinforced with a layer of plastic. I spent the winter taking the plastic off and putting it back on, dumping melted water out of the plastic, etc. Next time around, I doubled the row cover, left it on that way all season and didn't use plastic. It worked very well and enabled the plants to get more water from melting snow and ice - and I didn't have to be always dealing with the plastic layer. Of course, if there had been a bad hailstorm or other extreme there could have been some setbacks.

3. Stick with cool-season vegs and you will do very well. Don't try to grow summer crops in the winter. Save the corn, tomatoes, peppers, squash for summer.

One really nice thing about the winter veg garden here is that it allows you to grow cabbage family crops during the time of year that there are no pesky cabbage worms. Many fewer pests of all kinds in fact, although slugs kind of like the environment created by a protected bed in winter. I had a very good crop of collard greens last winter.

With temps currently hovering in the mid to high 80s, and rainfall, we have ideal conditions for germinating many fall vegs for our area right now.

When you garden year round in our area, you discover that what we really have is three seasons for cool-weather vegs, and one (summer) for the hot season stuff.
-Organica

Organica,

Thanks for your help. I have Elliot Coleman's book but seem to have misplaced it.
When you speak of plastic mesh, do you mean the orange kind with the holes in it?

I'm looking forward to eating healthier this winter. Thanks again.

Betty

Betty:
Any kind of flexible plastic fencing material that does the job. I usually use the green stuff, about 2 feet high. But it depends on what works in your garden setup to create the right height frame for the row cover. Chicken wire works also, but it can snag and tear the row cover. Be sure to cover the ends of any stakes so they don't make holes in the row cover - I use empty plastic containers and small soda bottles for this.

In the colder weather you might have more interference from deer, of course.
-O