Growing Veggies in Cool Temps

Are you enjoying the slow cool-down we're having this Fall? It's a great time to clean up the beds while the temperatures are cool enough to work up a healthy sweat pulling out corn stalks and raking leaves off the lawn.

It's sad to put the garden to bed, though - summer's sweet days with blue skies and bright sunlight are gone, taking all the flowers and pretty colors of the veggies with them. The breezes across my yard have just the tiniest hint of winter and I miss the noisiest of the summer birds at the feeder.

But (aha!) there is a little glimmer of a growing season still in my garden - I'm experimenting with growing vegetables into the late Autumn, early Winter.

When I lived in the Willamette Valley, the growing season was beautifully long - the weeds grew every month of the year even if the vegetables didn't. I didn't know then that some veggies love the cool weather and I could have been growing broccoli, lettuce, peas, and all the root vegetables for most of the year, with a break for summer heat which they all hate.

Now that I'm in Central Oregon, my growing season is frighteningly short - between 75 and 90 days. Some years it's almost impossible to grow corn or tomatoes outside of greenhouse. The cool summer nights stop the growth and the poor heat-loving plants can't always recover enough to produce good crops. So I grow a lot of the veggies that love our cool Springs and nuture them carefully as far into Summer as I can (shading the lettuces got me a few more weeks of harvest in June).

Now that I've gotten the last of the "hot" veggies out of the ground - beans, corn, tomatoes - I've got lots of room to plant a Fall crop.

Since the temperatures are staying warmer than usual, I think I'll put in a cover crop of legumes - some garden peas will like the Fall rains and they should be able to grow enough before the snow falls. I know my Summer corn uses up a lot of nitrogen so I can turn the pea plants back into the soil in the Spring, replenishing the bed where I intend to grow corn next year.

 The carrots and potatoes are still in the ground so I'll wait until early Winter to dig them up, before the ground freezes solid.
 A few of the raised beds get lots of sun in the afternoon and are protected from cold winds by a hedge, so I may build some cloches to grow broccoli and lettuce.

Several years ago I found this OSU publication with great directions for building a raised bed garden cloche. I built mine with row cover and deer screening instead of the plastic, but in the cooler Fall temps, the plastic is a better choice. If I also put some row cover over the plants inside the cloche when the nighttime temps get really low, I should be able to extend the growing season into December.

There's a ton of information in these publications if you want to try some cool-season gardening:

Cover Crops - http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1957/17462/fs304-e.pdf

Fall and Winter Vegetable Gardening in PNW -
 https://catalog.extension.oregonstate.edu/pnw548

Warm Season Crops in a Cool Climate -  http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1957/21092/k-em9027coolseason.pdf?sequence=12

 Build your own raised bed cloche - http://extension.oregonstate.edu/deschutes/sites/default/files/ec1627-e.pdf