Greenhouse Gardening – winter vegetables

If you have a greenhouse the pleasure of having fresh vegetables for the tale in the winter months can’t be overestimated – there’s nothing like home-grown salad in January, or lovely fiery radishes on the Boxing Day table to go with the cold turkey. However, to grow anything above the most basic vegetables over the winter you need to develop a regular routine that monitor conditions in your greenhouse carefully and creates the right environment for any tender and fragile plants.

If the day is clear and warm, visit your greenhouse by midmorning to check the temperature. If it is higher than ideal, open a doors or vents to lower the temperature, but remember to avoid draughts. Check the temperature again in early afternoon, to ensure it has not rocketed or dropped because of winter cloud cover. In late afternoon or evening, visit your greenhouse and close it up. This is the time to water your plants if they need it – remember that while most plants need less water in winter, if you are trying to grow winter vegetables you want to avoid letting them dry out as they will tend to slip into dormancy.

Try these to add some winter glory to your dinner table :

Spinach, kale, and some varieties of lettuce will live through the winter even in a cold frame and will thrive if grown in tubs in the greenhouse. Even potatoes can be grown in a big bucket under glass – as long as you recognised that will only get to new potato size. However, once you’ve lifted a potato plant and cleared it of reasonably sized tubers, replant it in fresh soil and in six weeks or so you’ll have a small second crop that you can use as salad potatoes.

Other possibilities are cabbage, bok choy, Chinese cabbage, and most root crops. Leeks, beets, carrots, turnips, parsnips, radishes, and rutabagas can be sown in summer for winter harvest and moved into the greenhouse.

Greenhouse gardening winter veg photograph by rightee, used under a creative commons attribution licence