GROW A WINTER Market Garden
Running a profitable market garden in winter can be challenging. In my area, the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, winter subjects us to everything from subzero temperatures at night to sudden daytime pops of heat that will make spinach bolt. Fortunately, modern advances in plant protection technology — I’m talking about cheap plastic and cloth, folks — help our carefully chosen plants weather this testy season.
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In his 1909 book French Market-Gardening, John Weathers notes that Parisian markets completely outshone English ones in winter, and he credits the French gardeners’ growing techniques. Parisians used glass cloches, which are essentially miniature greenhouses, over each plant or set of plants that needed protection, and bioorganic heating in the form of fresh, decomposing manure under the growing media. Cloches were so expensive that the gardeners took great pains not to break them, often repairing them by hand if they were damaged.
Modern market gardeningwood-framed, barn-sized structure, but for most of your growing, any single-layered hoop house will work. Instead of expensive, breakable, and sometimes irreparable glass cloches, a 12-by-50-foot hoop house for less than $1,000 will serve your needs all year long. However, a hoop house alone won’t overcome the winter extremes I mentioned.
