The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Moving quick hoops

Quick hoop

Once our nightly frosts got down to the high 20s, quick hoops were no longer enough to protect our last tomato plants.  So I ripped out the dead vines (and two gallons of green tomatoes to pass on to the chickens) and moved the quick hoop over to our broccoli, tatsoi, mustard, and tokyo bekana.

Thanks to my obsession with planting greens at the end of the summer, our vegetables are still coming almost entirely out of the garden.  I've thawed out a couple of cups of sweet corn to go in soup and a few dried squash and mushrooms to round out our lasagna.  But mostly we're eating fresh veggies still --- mixtures of sauteed leafy greens every day, salad with the last tommy-toes and sweet peppers still ripening inside, and an occassional head of broccoli.

Add in the oats and oilseed radishes that are vibrantly growing organic matter for our soil, and the garden still feels completely alive.  I wonder how late into the winter we can eat fresh?



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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I definitely have to try quick hoops in the spring. I'm very excited to think that I can 'shrink winter' down to just a couple or 3 months. With a few plants still growing in my cold frames November does not feel as depressing as usual.
Comment by John Amrhein Thu Nov 10 08:58:55 2011
That's my dream too --- keeping the part of the winter with no fresh food as short as possible. This is the first year I've done more than put lettuce in a cold frame, though, so it's all a big experiment. I'm very happy with the results so far!
Comment by anna Thu Nov 10 11:24:59 2011





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