On Christmas Day we went out to the garden to take care of what we should have done in the fall. And we made a video about it. How unusual.

I’m a big fan of Eliot Coleman, and his book, The Four Season Harvest. Its full of a ton of information, one of the things that stuck with me is that South of France is on the same parallel, the 44th, as Eliot’s house in Maine. France grows vegetables in the winter, and we don’t. Or most of us don’t. Eliot does grow vegetables in winter. Check out his site here Eliot has a new book out on winter gardening, The Winter Harvest Handbook, which you can buy from your local bookstore or here.

I usually put a cold frame on one of our raised beds to grow cold hard greens in the late fall and early spring. I have yet to master Eliot’s methods of getting greens thru the winter. You can see our video on how to build a cold frame on this page of our site.

Watch this Gardenfork episode for more on plastic mulch, cold frames, and of course the Labradors.

We’ve already had 2 frosts here, and I wanted to continue the salad green season. In this episode we build a cold frame out of easily found materials.

The vent I use on one end of the cold frame is available from Charlie’s Greenhouse, I’ve also seen them in the big home improvement stores, they are used to vent crawlspaces.

You can see some plans for our hoop house cold frame here

Sheperd Ogden has a good book: Four-Season Harvest, that goes into great detail about growing thru the winter, he should know, he lives in Vermont.