If you think the gardening season is limited to spring, summer and fall, think again. A surprising number of vegetables grow well throughout the winter, and with a little help from a greenhouse and your trusty greenhouse staging, you’ll hardly miss your summer garden. Plants listed in the article can all be grown in an unheated greenhouse through the winter, providing you adhere to a few guidelines. 

 

Plants: the plants suitable for winter are; potatoes, kale, cabbage, winter lettuce, onions, spinach and a few more inbetween. 

 

Guidelines: 

  • Get your timings rights, plant them before the days get too short and before it gets too cold
  • Planting them in the winter means that you’ll be ahead of the game when it comes to Spring
  • Bear in mind, unless you have some form of lighting in your greenhouse, very little actually grows in the winter months of December and January. Things just tend to tick over and then grow like mad when the days start to lengthen again. So don’t panic, turn up the heat or even resort to kicking your greenhouse – this is just nature’s little present for early next year.

 

Growing Information for Plants

 

Potatoes: Try growing early potatoes in old plastic buckets or any large container or even a flowerpot. Maris or most early potatoes (ask your local supplier) can be grown this way. Three quarters fill each container with a compost of two parts soil from the garden, one part compost from your heap and one part sharp sand and plant one or two tubers in each container.  

Bear in mind the containers will take up quite a bit of greenhouse floor space, but the taste of early home grown organic potatoes make it all completely worthwhile. Providing the weather isn’t frosty and you need space to work in the greenhouse, the potatoes can be moved out of the greenhouse into the garden during the day and back into the greenhouse at night. Your first potatoes should be ready to harvest in May. Search around with your bare hands, pull out the biggest and leave the others to grow on.

 

Kale, Cabbage, Spinach: and most other root crops such as; leeks, beets, carrots, turnips, parsnips, radishes, and rutabagas  and some varieties of onion can be grown through Winter in a greenhouse and you’ll get a much earlier crop than if you’d waited till spring to start your planting.

 

Winter Lettuce: If you like salads there are at least a couple of winter hardy lettuce that will grow in a cold greenhouse or poly-tunnel through the winter; Arctic King is one variety. Kwiek and Little Gem and other varieties of lettuce can be sown in your greenhouse in October and then planted into seed trays when big enough and into pots in December. 

No need to wait until the lettuce plants have formed hearts, start harvesting when the leaves are big enough to add to salad. Leave some lettuce plants to grow on as hearted lettuce and cut as required. You’ll have tasty lettuces when shop supplies are limited and expensive .