Season Extension

Row covers at our Urban Farm!

Hey gardeners!

Some years, spring never quite gets here. Luckily, that doesn’t mean you have to put your big garden plans on hold. Today, we’re going to talk about season extension!

In any given year, the gardening season is limited on both ends by the same obstacle: winter. Even after the worst of it is over in early spring, there’s still occasional frigid overnight temperatures and the lingering risk of frost, which are tricky for young plants to survive.

So, what’s a gardener to do?

Row covers are one way to keep your soil warm! They’re usually made of garden fabric, and can be laid over your garden beds to trap heat and keep your plants a few degrees warmer. That might not sound like much, but it can make a big difference. You can put these directly on the ground—when not held up by anything, they’re called “floating” row covers—and just add something heavy along the edges to hold them in place. That doesn’t have to be anything fancy—bricks, rocks, or spare pieces of lumber will work well. The idea is just to make sure your row covers don’t blow away!

Floating row covers are good for low-growing, flexible crops—as long as you leave some slack in the fabric, these plants will push the cover up as they grow. You can also use hoops of wire or PVC pipe to hold up your row covers. This keeps the covers from resting directly on your plants and is good for taller crops, like broccoli, or sensitive crops, like spinach.

Here’s a video about making this kind of raised row cover: https://www.almanac.com/video/how-make-row-cover-tunnel

You can also use a cold frame! A cold frame is just a box, usually higher in the back than in the front, with a clear, hinged lid (usually plastic or glass). They typically sit right on top of the soil. Cold frames are incredibly good at protecting plants from cold temperatures—in fact, the temperature inside the frame can be 10 to 20 degrees warmer than outside! It’s actually important to ventilate them by opening the top on sunny days to keep plants from overheating. Cold frames are good for hardening off transplants that were started indoors and overall for protecting tender plants in early spring.

Here’s an article about building your own cold frame: https://www.almanac.com/how-build-cold-frame