I would like to lengthen my growing season and continue to grow vegetables. How do I learn to do that?
Answer
Windbreaks, walls, cloches, hoophouses and coldframes are ways to extend the season by growing fall and winter crops. See Ed Humes’ Fall and Winter Vegetable Planting Guide for details on how to keep the harvest coming through the fall.
Travis Saling’s Westside Gardener website has simple instructions for building a PVC hoophouse to extend warm season gardening a month or more at both ends of the growing season. For more how-to’s, consult Denny Schrock’s Building and Using Hotbeds and Coldframes, University of Missouri Extension Service factsheet. Another reoommended source is Eliot Coleman’s The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year-Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses, available in PHS’s McLean Library.
And don't forget to consult PHS's calendar of events. We sometimes cover this topic in our workshops.