Hi Kim! I was really inspired by Elliot Coleman's book too, and have now had great winter gardens using various kinds of hoops and covers for the past 4 years. I use AgriBon 19 row cover most of the time, and add 4 or 6 mil plastic sheeting over the top when the temp. drops below 25 or so. Can't remember exactly what temps I used to put the plastic on at, and right now I am in Vermont and don't have my records to look at. I successfully grew lettuce, spinach, arugula, beets, kale, chard, turnips and various mustards in my low tunnels. I have photos of the tunnels covered in snow and ice, and as soon as I could get the plastic off, the greens were still in great shape underneath. We've had salads every day all winter for the past 4 years!

Flis

Thanks so much for the encouragement. I have read a lot online but don't know anyone that has ever tried this. I was just going to use plastic but I think I will go ahead and ged the Agribon cover too.
I am curious as to how long it will take from planting to harvest. I cant wait to get it all set up.
kim

I use the Agribon much more than the plastic, so find it really useful. The first year I tried this, I took the Agribon off each time I put the plastic on (when the temps dropped below 25º or so) but quickly found it worked better to just add the plastic on top of the Agribon. It seems to insulate any leaves which brush up against it, and get frost burnt against the plastic but not the Agribon.
One of the trickiest parts for me is getting the plants established before it gets too cold. Once it gets really cold and the daylight hours diminish, it seems that they will "hold" in the garden, but not really grow actively. So you have to get them to a decent size before that happens. I started mine back in late September, but have had to keep row cover on them since the grasshoppers are still a problem.
Good luck! I'm far from an expert, just a happy beginner, but any questions I can answer, I'm glad to!

Flis

Kim, I don't know which of Eliot Coleman's books you have. If you have "The Winter Harvest Handbook", you might note his comments in Chapter 4 about his yearly schedule and Chapter 5 about sunlight, where he discusses the variables involved and how they affect how long it takes them to go from seed to harvest in his location. For us, it is even easier, but how long it takes any given crop to mature will vary a great deal depending on when you sowed the seed, how much sunlight and warmish weather it grew in before the weather cooled down, how much sunlight the growing area gets, etc. He also discuss the latitude and longitude of various locations and their effect on when (calendar-wise) the daylength gets short enough to impede plant growth. I found that was one of my favorite parts of the book because it made me think about how stuff grows in other parts of the country and the world.

My experiences with fall plants are similar to Flis', which makes sense as we garden at opposite north-south ends of the same county. I like to get most things planted for the winter garden in September, although some years I've gotten away with planting in October or even in November (in the year we didn't have our first freeze until mid-December). I generally don't plant spinach until October as it is fairly cold hardy and grows quickly. I think that daylength (the number of hours of sunlight in a given day) influences plant growth even more than cold temperatures, so usually you will get good plant growth until the daylength starts getting really short in December. Once the daylength gets short and the nights get really cold, the plants can go into a sort of holding pattern when they just sit there and don't make much, if any, new growth. This is something Eliot Coleman discusses in The Winter Harvest Handbook too----for his location, I believe a daylength of 10 hours is the benchmark where new plant growth stops occurring and the plants stay in a holding pattern. You still can harvest and eat them though. That's one reason his book is called The Winter HARVEST Handbook----a lot of his planting is done prior to the true onset of winter and by the time they officially are in winter, all he is doing is harvesting from those plants, not getting more growth from them. If you have his "Four Season Harvest" book, I don't remember what he said in it. It has been a long time since I read that one.

I normally use Agribon-19 for in-ground plants in the winter, but will put either DeWitt Ultimate Frost Blanket on top of the Agribon-19 if really cold weather threatens or will throw moving blankets over the hoops that support the Agribon. Both the frost blanket and moving blankets are very heavy and I don't use them a lot. They Ultimate Frost Blanket really blocks out the light, so it is more of a nighttime cover for me. I have found it harder to successfully garden under 4 to 6 mm plastic suspended over hoops. Those sort of low tunnels covered with heavy plastic are terrific if it is a cloudy snowy or sleety day, but on a bright, sunny winter day, you can get an incredible amount of heat buildup in winter in just a short time.

My greenhouse is a high tunnel and it has 50% aluminet shade cloth on it year-round. If I fail to go outside first thing in the morning on a sunny winter day and open it up, the temperature inside of it can hit 145 degrees in an hour or so of daylight. That is in a a high tunnel with 4 vents, 2 doors and shadecloth. Can you imagine how much heat would build up underneath clear plastic on a sunny winter day? I've never stuck a thermometer inside a low, plastic tunnel to see how warm or cold it gets, but I know from experience that row covers of all kinds (I now have 4 different weights, and each supplies a different degree of cold protection and each allows a different percentage of light to reach the plants) work better for me than plastic does. I like using a layer of plastic on really cold nights. I will put it over the row cover tunnel around noon so it can soak up heat and sunlight and get nice and warm, but I remove it the next morning as early as possible. Remember the famed greenhouse effect will occur with low tunnels covered in plastic. That doesn't mean you cannot use them, but rather than you just need to watch them carefully or you can fry your plants (or bake or broil or roast them) on a sunny winter day. The smaller a tunnel is, whether high or low, the more quickly it both heats up and cools down.

I normally don't use buckets or jugs of water as a solar heat collector with cool-season plants. I save those for the spring-planted tomato and pepper plants that need help to get through the occasional very cold nights that occur after they are transplanted into the bed. Since you're further north than I am, you might need plastic,\ and you might need solar heat collectors in the coldest part of the winter and if y'all stay cloudy a lot in winter, maybe the low tunnel wouldn't overheat on bright, sunny days. For me, though, the plastic stuff heats up so much and I am not always at home to uncover it. Even when I think I am going to be at home all day, all it takes is for the fire pager to go off and I leave the house and I might be gone for 30 minutes or for 10 hours. That makes using plastic really risky for me since I may not be at home to remove it at the right time.

I haven't planted anything for fall because my summer garden is still in almost full production. The okra and muskmelons are done, but we're still getting everything else, including watermelons. I do think I might have harvested the last 2 watermelons last week though because the ones that are left are only about the size of a golf ball and likely won't get large enough to mature before the first fall freeze. I worried and fretted that between the grasshoppers, the persistent heat and the drought, a fall garden wouldn't work for me. It also would have meant I'd have to sacrifice summer plants that still were producing like crazy. So, I skipped planting anything for fall, which probably was smart in this instance. We still are getting oodles of peppers, tomatoes, winter squash, southern peas, roselles (tons and tons of them...it is shocking how many there are) and.....I haven't even started digging sweet potatoes yet. I also see a good crop of native persimmons on the trees, but don't harvest them until after the first frost has rendered them edible.

After the first freeze has occurred, I am sure I"ll wish I'd planted a winter garden, but by then I'll be all wrapped up in holiday preparations and will say "just as well I don't have a garden to take care of". lol I still have time to sow lettuce and other greens if I want for fall. I do have some perennial onions and herbs that we can harvest and use all winter. With drought the last few years, I've been so tired of it all that I haven't tended to plant much for fall and winter because I want a break. I always have the option of growing greens and radishes indoor on my light shelves in winter if I get in the mood to grow something.

Some years I overwinter a lot of stuff in the greenhouse, which is unheated. It gets really warm during the day even with the doors and vents open, and cools off a lot at night, but with water-filled molasses feed tubs and cat litter buckets that serve as solar collectors, it usually stays a good 10-14 degrees warmer at night than the outdoors. However, I have to choose to grow either warm season stuff in there in the winter or cool season stuff, and then manipulate the temperatures in the greenhouse accordingly. If I keep it hot enough during the day to keep tomatoes and peppers happy, the lettuce gets too hot and bolts.

Regarding how slowly some edible crops grow during the worst of the winter months, it varies wildly from year to year depending on how many sunny days we have versus cloudy days. You'll have to experiment to see what you get. My plants in the ground grow pretty well until December and then don't get much larger, but beets and carrots seem to do just fine on lower light. Maybe it is because their edible part is below ground.

Dawn

I would use the gray plastic electrical conduit before I would use white pvc. And I'd much rather have metal conduit than either.

www.lostcreek.net sells benders for low tunnels; I bought my high tunnel bender from them. I haven't built my first low tunnels yet, but I will probably buy their bender and use metal conduit.

Thanks Flis
I was wondering if it is too late to get this going but I figure either way I will learn something. And because the weather is unpredictable it might be the best year for me. I have all the seeds I need and I will just have to buy the agribon. if my body would cooperate I will get the seeds in today.
kim

I live about 30 miles from Kansas and about 10 miles from Missouri and my winter weather gets too warm for low tunnels covered in plastic unless I vent them most days, but my nights get too cold to not cover the beds at other times.

I have lots of in-ground beds and a few raised beds, but my neighbors cats think the raised beds belong to them if I don't cover my winter crops. I have a tube bender from lostcreek that makes a four foot arch. I have about a dozen 1/2 inch electric conduit hoops now and will probably be adding more as Spring planting time approaches.

I have a few pieces of 3/4 inch conduit that were cut in half and I sometimes push them into the ground four feet apart and drop the half inch hoops down into the 3/4 inch pipe. line them up in 2 straight rows 3-4 feet apart, and cover the top of the entire thing with Agribon. In fact, there is a funny thread about my 'covered wagon' cover a few years ago when we were having hot scorching weather and I built a cover over my peppers so they wouldn't get sunscald.

Another year I wrapped row cover around the sides and dropped a plastic cover just over the top part and kept my peppers producing until after Thanksgiving. That was before I had a hoop bender and had to build a 'structure' with tomato cages. It looked like a Halloween spook house, but it worked.

I haven't planted anything for winter, but I still may drop a few hardy plant seeds into a raised bed and cover it. I have two patio doors that I hope to use as tops for a cold frame, but don't have it built yet. Being gone for 6 months has put me way behind and I may never catch up.

Oops, I forgot to address the water bottle idea. I do not leave water bottles in my bed, but on really cold nights I have been known to fill bottles with HOT water and put them under the plant covers just before I go to bed for the night. I can do this because my garden is very close to my house and has good lighting.

I also have the low tunnel 4' wide pipebender from Lost Creek and like it, but I also use PVC with some of the low tunnels. I have 14 big raised beds and most of them will have low tunnels over them in late winter/early spring since our weather fluctuates so much. Even the onions have low tunnel hoops, but theirs is covered with chicken wire for hail protection, not with fabric for cold protection.

Kim, You might get a great harvest. Fall has been really warm so far (we've been running 10-15 degrees above our average daily high most of this month) so if ever there was a year to plant late for fall/winter and get away with it, this might be it.

Carol, I never catch up either, and I can't even blame it on being gone. I think I live my life 3-6 months behind schedule all the time. We went into Lowe's yesterday to buy what I hope is the last can of paint to finish painting the house, and the Christmas decorations have completely taken over the store. Christmas? I don't even have any Halloween decorations out, except for two Long Island Cheese Pumpkins that I harvested the other day, and stacked one atop the other by the front door.Those two pumpkins likely will be the extent of my Halloween decoration....and maybe my Thanksgiving decorating as well. It seems like just yesterday it was the Fourth of July and now it is almost November. How did all that time fly by so quickly? When I'm busy harvesting and canning, and squeezing in whatever weeding or clean up I can, I sort of tune out everything else and suddenly come out of my gardening/canning "coma" one day and realize it is time to start the Christmas shopping. No wonder the years fly by so quickly!

Dawn

I can't blame the canning this year since the only thing I did was 18 jars of apple butter. I did put a few things in the freezer. I think I need to freeze some squash tomorrow because we are getting more than we can eat and might enjoy some zucchini bread this winter. The vine is covered with small squash that probably won't have time to mature. Not bad for a volunteer.

That is terrific for a volunteer squash plant. I'd freeze some too in order to have zucchini bread this winter.

It is cold enough this morning, with even colder weather expected Saturday morning, that I am going to start the big push to get all the harvesting done before then, except for a couple of plants I might cover with floating row cover. I'm going to dig all the sweet potatoes, both edible varieties and the handful of ornamental ones I grew as a living ground cover underneath the pepper plants. I want to get them curing ASAP so I can get them into storage before the curing area gets too cold. Also, I need a few cured in time for eating at Thanksgiving. I'm going to leave the winter squash vine that has developed new pumpkins since September's rain fell. One of the pumpkins is only about the size of a cantaloupe but the other few are a little bigger than a football, so if I can keep the plant from freezing, they might reach a decent size before Thanksgiving. It won't be real easy to cover up a big old pumpkin vine that roaming here and there, climbing tomato cages and fences, but I have enough row cover to do it. Not sure if I have enough patience. It wasn't a volunteer, but it was a leftover seedling I stuck in the ground on the edge of a row of tomatoes and they kept it too shaded for most of the summer. It is making up for lost time now.

Other than that pumpkin, I might cover up a Cherokee Purple tomato plant that has fully green fruit that is almost full-sized. If they'd break color I could harvest them, but they're slow to break at this time of the year. There are other tomato plants with fruit, but we've been harvesting tomatoes since the end of April and I am just about tired of tomatoes so I'm not going to cover up all those plants. Most of them have fruit so small that it won't mature before the first freeze even if I cover them up this week.

We aren't expecting a freeze here later in the week, but we'll be in the low 40s or upper 30s so frost is a distinct possibility. And, of course, we could drop colder than forecast and freeze anyhow. That's fairly common for our microclimate.

I thought about covering up the hot pepper plants with hoops and row covers, but we've already canned and frozen more than we can eat anyhow, so I'll just harvest whatever ones are a usable size today, and let that be the end of it.

I've noticed I'm much more willing to do lots of cold weather protection at the beginning of the season when I'm eager to get the garden going than at the end of the season when I'm tired and ready to just let things go. I do have a stack of row cover sitting right by the garage's walk-out door in case I get a sudden urge to cover up half the garden and keep it going a bit longer, but I doubt that I will get that urge.

Dawn and Cole thank you also for your info. I must have been writing when you were posting. it is so hard to eat right out here I felt like I had to try something.
Since I am on a tight budget I have to use free pvc this go round but maybe if I continue I can invest in the more permanent pipe.
Dawn I recently just stumbled onto mother of a hubbard who really inspired me and led me to Elliot Colemans book the 4 season harvest.. I had heard of low tunnels during the winter but they just make it sound so possible. I love the idea of eating fresh greens every other day.
I understand I may not get a huge harvest but I am willing to try. Also thanks for telling me about the water bottles, I will save those for when its freezing.
kim

Again I was writing while yall were posting. I stayed running behind this year more than others. My problem has been the attitude oh I have plenty of time and then 10 things pop up that I have to take care of or that slow me down and I run out of the plenty of time.
I am going to go gung ho and hope for the best and if I least get swiss chard to cooperate I will be happy. I did not get everything planted yesterday but all the little beds are ready, I just have to find all my seeds.
I plan on watching the temps close to know when to uncover. I think I will use the agribon and plastic on the cold nights. As long as we don't freeze like it did my first year here I think it should be pretty good.
Thank y'all for all the help and suggestions
kim