I am doing one last garden tour in 2020 on this very uh, dismal gray rainy day on the third
week of November and it'll be a quick one, but I mainly wanted to do this to show you what is still
thriving in the garden in November in Ohio Zone 6. So I do use some row covers and frost blankets
on some of my crops but mainly I focus on just planting really really cold hardy vegetables.
So let's take a look! Now this is one of my favorite beds and I did have this one
covered-- we got down to, I think our lowest has been 25 so far and that was just one night
but we've had multiple nights in the upper 20s and while most of these veggies can take that
I just wanted to be extra precautious with this bed. So what you'll see in here is this lovely mix
of kale and lettuce and red stemmed mizuna. I've got a radicchio here, some escarole and endive,
and over here is some purple sprouting broccoli. Now I'll swing over here to this bed
and you can see a few items that I've not had to cover at all. This Casper kale,
the Joy's Midnight chard and I've got a Freckles lettuce over here that I have not
used any kind of frost protection at all with and they are all thriving in this cool weather.
And of course this is also my lacinato-type kale. This was a spring planted kale
and it just cracks me up how these end up looking like little palm trees
as they get harvested from the bottom up. But these also have not had any winter protection.
Here I've got a large planting of cauliflower and I did have this covered. Cauliflower is the most
finicky of the brassicas and it can really respond poorly when you get these real big
dips in temperature and these were so close to producing heads I wanted to make sure that I
got a harvestable head off of them so I did cover them when we got down in the 20s. But now I've got
some lovely nice heads in here that are ready for picking. And this one is actually a sprouting type
cauliflower, so it gets these kind of stalks with florets rather than one solid head because I found
that this type actually does better for me here in Ohio than the solid headed types often do.
Now collards are another cold hardy green that I have planted and you can see that I've got the
hoops set up in case I do need to cover them but I have not yet. They're an incredibly cold hardy
crop and for a long time I didn't grow them in the fall because I just associated them
with the South and I didn't realize they were as cold hardy as they are. But these are one of
the cold hardiest greens and they're one where the frost improves their sweetness and flavor.
Now my Chinese cabbage have seen better days. Mainly a lot of this is still cabbage worm damage.
But these also were not covered during that cold spell and they seem to fare just fine. For me
these have also proved to be more heat tolerant than typical ball headed cabbages so I'm really
loving these in the garden. And this particular variety is Winter Crisp-- the catalog described
it as big barrel headed cabbages, they were not kidding! Of course I've got the
standards in here-- my lettuce, I've got more of that frizzy mustard and kale back behind me,
chard, more pac choi and none of these things have been covered through our cold spells.
My beet greens don't look the best but the roots underground so far are just fine. If I'd covered
my beets the greens would probably still be in fine condition. Now when the ground starts to
freeze I will definitely want to get these out of here but for right now they hold just fine in the
ground. Carrots are the same way. The carrot tops do fare a little better than the beet tops but
those roots will hold in the ground, I was pulling up carrots last year in January out of these beds
and they were just fine. Now that's a yellow carrot and he probably could have stayed in the
ground a little longer but no cold damage to that guy. And over here is another of my favorite beds.
I love this mixture of red and green lettuce I've also got white salad turnips spinach,
some daikon radish, and then the bed over there I've got my overwintering onions,
scallions or green onions, and spinach as well. A few other vegetable crops I'm growing which
have tolerated the cold just fine with no protection at all are: brussels sprouts,
cabbage, cilantro and parsley, broccoli, and surprisingly calendula. I did not realize
quite how cold tolerant this flowering herb is. My kohlrabi very likely would have been fine but
I've already eaten all of it. And my dill seems to be making a comeback after the first couple
of hard frosts. Now one fall crop that definitely did not put up with the heavy frost were my peas.
I got a couple good pickings off of these but when the nighttime temperatures were getting down into
the 20s and we had several heavy frosts it finally did them in. So that's pretty much what's going on
in the garden right now. And I'd love to hear from you-- what are some of your favorite cold hardy
crops to grow in the fall garden? And if you find content like this helpful please consider
subscribing to my channel, Growfully with Jenna. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time!