Forested Home Garden in Cold Climate - Part 2 Execution, Timing, and Greenhouse

Now that we understand the design of the forested home garden in cold climate (check the previous newsletter), we must address the unique constraints of the temperate climate.

Between the tropics and the temperate zones, the same principles apply but in different ways.

In this edition, in 4 minutes or less:

#1 How to garden in cold climates

#2 The single most important structure is a well insulated greenhouse

How to garden in cold climates

Its uniqueness lies:

• Avoiding over-shading and interplanting tree crops because light saturation is not a problem.
• The need to store crops in the field or at home over the winter months.
• The need to bridge the "hungry gap" that occurs in the middle of spring, when the winter crops are finished and the new crops are not yet ripe.
• The need to have a glasshouse to extend the growing season.
• Use trellises in your garden because many peas, beans, and cucurbits grow well on them.
• Small fruits like currants, gooseberries, raspberries, and blackberries (which can also be grown on trellises) are a quintessential cold-climate feature. They produce vitamin-C-rich food and can also act as windbreaks.
• Continue to use mulch, because of its benefits. Although the soil takes more time to warm up in the spring after winter, crops planted in mulch catch up with those planted in bare soil and mature at the same time. The exception is spring carrots, which need warmer soil from the time they are planted. Therefore, it is necessary to pull the mulch away from their seedbed.

In practice, this is what you should pay attention to:

• There are two main planting periods:
  • The first months of spring:
    • Salads
    • Vegetables
    • Summer crops
  • The last month of summer or the first month of autumn:
    • Overwintering crops
    • Root crops
• There is a third planting period before winter in milder areas:
  • Oats
  • Vetch (Vicia sativa)
  • Fava beans
• Use a cellar, pit, or freezer storage to store food:
  • Potatoes: store them in straw or ash, in dark boxes or humid cellars.
  • Carrots and parsnips: store them with their tops removed in mounds of sand or ash.
  • Apples: store them separately from root crops to prevent the ethylene they produce from causing the roots to sprout. They should be wrapped separately or spread out on attic floors.
  • Cabbage and kale: store them uprooted, covered with hay in the open, or preserve them as sauerkraut (through fermentation).
  • Many crops can also be stored frozen in freezers.
• So, it boils down to:
  • Small beds for spring planting, with the main crops being potatoes, tomatoes, and sweet corn.
  • Large production beds for autumn planting to provide winter storage crops such as potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, cabbage, fava beans, peas, and brassicas.
  • Chards and parsley can be planted in several successions so that they are always available, since they are important foods.
  • The winter gap is bridged by growing root crops, cucurbits, and other crops suitable for preservation (which mature in late summer).
    • Stable root crops: potatoes, parsnips, carrots, oca, Jerusalem artichokes, and bulbs (such as onions).
    • Crops to be left to overwinter: fava beans, kale, chard (silver beet), parsley, cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower.

The single most important structure is a well insulated greenhouse

The single most important structure is a greenhouse because you can start your plants there before the outside temperature is warm enough.

That gives you new possibilities that are essential in this climate. In order to do that, you don't need a lot of space because the young plants that you start inside are transplanted outside quite quickly, so the seedlings have a high turnover. With a 4.5 m² workspace for these young plants, you can supply a 1,000 m² garden. Even small greenhouses can be expensive, but there are permaculture solutions that can help you make them feasible, like the chicken- or guinea pig-heated greenhouse dedicated to seedlings that only needs 10 m², which we talked about in this previous newsletter(This is exactly one of the things we like about permaculture: the design method gives you the tools to connect different elements together so that you can come up with an animal-heated greenhouse that functions as a normal greenhouse while also serving as an animal shed, fundamentally changing your relationship with nature and solving a problem in a simple, elegant, and efficient way.)

Of course, this is just one permaculture practice. Another efficient (and feasible) practice is to connect the greenhouse to your home (we will analyze two such designs—one developed in the USA and another in Germany—in a future newsletter in this series) and to also use the ancient hotbed technique.

Don't overlook the greenhouse, and don't stay stuck with inefficient unfeasible greenhouse designs.

Heat and sunlight are the scarcest resources, both in quantity and duration, in cold climates.

Our sustainable practices are:

• Building greenhouses to extend the growing season.
• Creating a sun-trapping, multi-layered garden (that resembles a forest) to make the most of the sun while it is available.
• Incorporating animals and composting as heat sources to extend the growing season while gaining the fertility boost from animal droppings and/or compost.
• Carefully planning the growing season to avoid missing the window of opportunity.
• Carefully planning food storage and the cultivation of winter crops to bridge the winter period and the "hungry gap."

By combining the forested design from Part 1 with the execution strategy here, you create a resilient, productive system that thrives even in the harshest winters.

See you next Tuesday!

Alexandre and Marina

Sources: Mollison, Bill, Remi M. Slay, Jeeves, Andrew. Permaculture: A Designers' Manual. Tagari Publications, 1988, pages 417-420.

Mollison, Bill, Remi M. Slay. Introduction to Permaculture, Tagari Publication, 1991, pages 112-116, 126.