Crops vs. Cold: A Research Trial

Rarely a week passes without someone asking me "Do you have any vegetables growing?" or "What can even grow this time of year?" Quite a bit, thankfully.

We are in what intensive farming guru Eliot Coleman of Maine, author of The New Organic Gardener, calls the "Persephone Days." In Greek mythology, Persephone was abducted by Hades and doomed to spend part of each year in the underworld, her absence creating a time of winter and barrenness in the upper world.

But in the Piedmont of North Carolina, our Persephone Days are brief and mild enough to keep fields green all year, even if the crops do grow very slowly. We're harvesting collards, spinach, kale, carrots and mustard greens. All except the mustard greens have been toughing it out with no row cover.

Recently, as an 11-degree night was approaching, we harvested the vegetables that likely would be ruined, such as the cabbage.

We gambled with a few patches of crops that had some chance of survival, for the sake of the knowledge and the possibility of bigger plants. The were under lightweight row cover, which will add 2 or 3 degrees or warmth at night by trapping the heat that accumulates in the soil during the day. Here are the results of our informal trial:

Broccoli: ✅

We were only harvesting side shoots at this point, the heads already having been harvested. Most of the stronger plants survived.

Lettuce: ❌

We left a small patch. They'd survived 20 degree nights, and it was just too tempting to see how far they could go. Even under a double row of cover, most of the heads had rib damage deep into the plant.

Carrots: ✅

Damage to some outer leaves.

Kale, mustard greens, carrots and spinach: ✅

Some cold damage, but bounced back fine.

Collards: ✅ ✅ ✅

The true champs.

In other news, the hens continue to be spoiled and have decided we humans are as benign as fence posts - one flapped up and sat on my head this week.