Winter gardening adventures

This is the inside of my new low tunnel. I used to have a larger greenhouse, but it was getting pretty beat up, so we decided to downsize right now. I’m hoping that eventually we could get it back up again, but we’d have to buy new plastic, and right now we’re just cannabalizing what we have. You can see above the inside of it, with leeks, mustard greens and chard. Also with a yogurt container. We have yogurt containers everywhere, I didn’t even notice it when I was taking the picture. They’re not recyclable, so we save them, and we use them for everything. They’re very useful for adding lime and other soil amendments.
My daughter planted radishes and covered them with straw all by herself. I was so proud when they sprouted! They’ve stopped growing at this point, but I’m hopeful that we may have homegrown radishes in February.
You can see some of the framework of the larger greenhouse, this last summer we used it to trellis the tomatoes by tying them with string to an overhead beam. It worked super well. Eliot Coleman describes it in his book The Four Season Harvest, which I LOVE. It’s a great reference for how to grow food all year long. It’s filled with wonderful advice, charts on when to plant in the fall for winter eating, ideas for how to make a better hoop house, and best of all, suggestions as to which varieties of all sorts of vegetables are best for the cold months. I didn’t do much in terms of planting for winter this year. In years before, I’ve planted and harvested lettuce, radishes, mache, leeks, carrots, chard, kale, spinach, turnips, arugula, and mustard greens for my cold weather crops. I’m hoping in a couple of months to get a jump on spring planting with my little low tunnel.