Are you ready to take your gardening game to the next level? Lindsey here from Lynette’s Urban Farm has got you covered! In this end-of-the-season report, I’ll walk you through our successful winter vegetable harvest, and give you a sneak peek at what’s to come as the weather warms up. From selecting the perfect spot for your plants to managing the delicate balance of sun and shade, I’ll teach you some tips you need to know to get the most out of your growing season.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 End of Season Report
0:49 Tomato & Kohlrabi
2:45 Lettuce & Carrots
4:41 Tips for Garden Beds
6:03 Next Season
TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO:
Hi, my name is Lindsey and I’m here at the Urban Farm. Today I wanted to share with you my end-of-the-season report. So as the spring starts up, as we begin to have warmer weather, we’re gonna start to say goodbye to some of our favorite winter vegetables. And I kind of wanted to just talk about what we planted this year, how I think the season went, and what I’m looking forward to planting now that spring is upon us.
If you think that the world is headed in a direction that makes you a bit concerned for the future and you’d like to be as self-sufficient and independent as possible, then you come to the right place. My name is Lynette Zang. Now it’s time to go Beyond Gold and Silver.
In front of me. I have what we call the conventional garden. These are just raised beds. We do a lot of production here in the winter and the summer. This area consistently gets full sun. So in the winter especially, it’s a great area to grow things like tomatoes, which I have here in front of me. So these tomatoes have been producing since about maybe midway through January, and you can see they have lots of flowers on them and as it warms up, they’ll just continue to be as productive, if not more productive. I have cherry tomatoes. These are Chadwick cherries, and then as well as some larger varieties. And hopefully as the season progresses and it gets warmer, these will get even bigger.
In the colder season, I’m okay with them being a little bit smaller. We just wanna make sure that they’re fruiting. And as we can see, we’ll get lots of tomatoes from this plant.
I also have some Kohlrabi. So Kohlrabi is one of the more interesting varieties I like to grow. The bulb of the Kohlrabi gets about this big eventually, and you can use similar to a potato. It’s a great roasted vegetable. It’s really mild but delicious. And then the leaves are edible as well. They’re more of a fibrous leaf, so you can cook it similar to spinach or kale. And right now you can see they’re just starting to bulb up. So these probably just didn’t get enough space as they would’ve liked. They kind of shaded each other out. So in the future, I will know to plant them a little bit more spaced out or just thin them out better. But I’m hoping that as it warms up, they’ll just bulb out really nicely and we might not have as long of a season with them, but hopefully we’ll get them all to produce.
In front, I did half this bed lettuce, I didn’t need that much Kohlrabi so this was a good way just to split the bed and use it entirely. And right now I am kind of just, we’re gonna use these heads, Chef Jayson is going to make some wonderful salads, but I’m just gonna let him clear out this bed and then we’ll compost it. And then I’m thinking peppers will probably go in here because they like this area and it’s really easy with these beds to just put hoops and then shade cloth in the summer. So that’s something I also really like about raised beds is it’s really easy to put shade cloth over them.
Also have some carrots. So our carrots just started getting big enough to harvest, and they’ll continue to get bigger as we harvest some and like thin them out a little bit. That’s what I like to do usually is I’ll plant them. I’ll do an initial thin out, and then as the season progresses, I will strategically pick the ones in the center and harvest those first, so then the two on the other side can get bigger. It’s just a way of keeping the carrot season going as long as possible. And then once this bed is clear, it’ll probably be home to cucumbers for the summer. But in the winter, this is one of my favorite beds to put carrots in. I feel like it’s really consistent. They like the sun and the wall here gives them some protection. Again, that’s a great thing to think about when you’re growing in the colder season is that you get a lot of wind and just a little bit harsher climates. So just keeping things protected. Carrots, especially when they’re young, are a little bit more fragile than something like a broccoli or a cauliflower. So just keeping those things in mind when you’re planting, wherever you’re planting.
And then also when we go into the spring or summer season and we’re gonna have more heat, we wanna think about where we’re putting things in terms of shade. How easily are we gonna be able to put shade cloth over it? How much natural shade does it get from the surrounding trees? This area up front, we have a singular palm tree that does very little in terms of shade, and otherwise we don’t really have a lot of structural shade. This bed back there gets some from the wall, but an area over like the rest of the front gets a lot more shade from our fruit trees. So just keeping that in mind. That’s one of the things that I struggle with personally is when we have an empty bed, we get really excited. We wanna put new crops in it, we wanna start a new season, but sometimes the things that we have ready and the beds that are ready don’t really mix well. So we wanna keep that in mind when we’re going forward.
Right now I have a lot of tomato and pepper transplants that are ready, but I want to grow those in several different areas because this area up front, they’ll get a really quick start and they’ll start producing really quickly. But we do get a lot of sun here and I can put shade cloth over it, but an area with natural shade might give them a longer season into the summer. So just things to consider.
But overall, I’m really happy with the production we got from our entire farm this year. We grew a lot of different winter varieties, and I’m excited that now as Chef Jayson here, a lot of this will be used in fun new ways and will be able to grow new varieties and experiment and share those ideas and recipes with you.
This is the end of our winter season, and while it can be sad, especially depending on where you live, sometimes the end of the season means you can’t be gardening for a while. If you are creative and you do some headstart planning, like doing transplants and things, you can really make your season start a lot faster. So once a lot of these beds open up, we’ll be planting cucumbers, okra, melon, tomatoes, peppers, and all the wonderful things that we get to enjoy throughout the summer. But I thought I would give you an update and let you know how things went this winter and what we’re looking forward to in the summer.
