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Winter gardening has its own special challenges and rewards. Winter gardening is really about extending the growing season and extending the harvesting of your vegetables. Winter gardening chores can include digging over your garden beds, and preparing your garden for the winter so that come spring, your soil will be prepared for another season. Of course, people in warmer states such as California and Florida have more opportunities for fall and winter gardening.

When it comes to vegetable and flower gardening, the climatic patterns of the lower elevation areas west of the Cascade Mountains in Washington, Oregon, Northwestern California, and British Columbia are quite suitable for Fall & Winter gardening. The key to successful winter gardening is knowing the average date of the first killing frost in your region (for example late October in the Pacific Northwest). Through the use of mulches and row covers, we can protect plantings from frost for an earlier start in the spring, and a later “shut-out” by cold weather in the fall.

The plus side of the winter dormancy is that, if you do get the timing right, your mature plants will also enter a period of dormancy, in which the “window of opportunity” for your harvest expands from the few days of a June lettuce into two or three months. For most of us, winter gardening consists of houseplants, seed starting and planning next year’s garden. One of the greatest pleasures of winter gardening is having time to plan. After we’ve had just enough winter to get stir-crazy the seed catalogs arrive with bright pictures of bountiful harvests. This is when we begin excitedly planning the best season ever!

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