Winter Gardening – Easy Growing Episode #2

Depending on where you live in the U.S. winter is a little known, but ideal, gardening seasons. South Florida, South Texas, Coastal Southwest, and Coastal California winter gives you the opportunity to grow delicate plants that otherwise would be damaged by the oppressive heat of your hot summers. Northern, Midwest, and colder area winter gardeners, take this advice and use it for your spring garden. Some popular vegetables can’t handle intense sun and high temperatures so cooler weather is an ideal time to grow them – in this episode Bryan takes you on a quick tour of what we’re growing in our winter garden.

 

 

Video Transcription

Hi everyone, I’m Bryan Traficante and this is episode 2 of ‘Easy Growing’!

Alright, so today I’m going be talking to you about a little less known gardening season, winter gardening! Where we take advantage of the cooler weather here in south Florida, and if you’re in south Texas, southwest U.S., or even coastal California… now is a really, really great time to start growing a garden because it’s not oppressively hot outside. If you’re in the northern U.S., or Midwest, the colder areas of the U.S…. take this advice and use it for your spring garden.

 

(Img. source: ghrme on flickr)

 

1. Take a Tour our Winter Garden

So, let’s go ahead and take you around to our garden and show you what we’re growing. Right here we have Swiss Chard. It’s actually not doing too great right now. We had a bit of a heat wave a couple of weeks ago and caused it to wilt a little bit. Hopefully it bounces back soon. We have some bell pepper, but really the main thing that we’re growing, that’s really tough in the summer here because it gets too hot, are our grape (cherry) tomatoes.

2. Growing Blue Cream Tomatoes

This is actually the blue cream variety. You can see it has a bluish color to it; and these yellow ones are just about ready to pick now. The reason we grow them now is that during the summer when we get up to the mid 90’s and the sun is really intense, it causes a lot of the plants to wilt and tomatoes to split and shrivel and things like that. So it gets very, very difficult. So now that it’s a little bit cooler, about 80 degrees, we can grow a whole bunch of tomatoes without issue.

3. Growing Romaine Lettuce

One of the other plants that we are growing is our romaine. So this is a smaller romaine variety here. We companion plant it next to our tomatoes to give it a little extra shade. Like I was talking about earlier though with the Swiss chard and the issue we had with the sun, you can see this plant right has a little bit of burn on it. Hopefully it’ll bounce back as well. Typically in the summer, again, it gets just too too hot for these plants to be able to thrive. So now is an excellent time to get growing.

4. Take Advantage of the Winter Gardening Season

So if you’re in south Florida, if you’re in south Texas, southwest U.S., coastal California… take advantage of this time; now into January and February when it’s finally a little bit cooler out and all your plants aren’t going to have burn and wilt and things like that because of the high temperatures. Take advantage of this time and start planting and growing.

Midwest gardeners, northern gardeners, cold area gardeners where it’s not 80 degrees right now; take this advice and start planning and getting ready for your spring garden. Spring is an excellent time to start growing some of these more heat sensitive plants, because in summer some of you still get too, too hot for them. So get ready for that. And that’s about it!

Tell us your Future Episode Interests in the Comments Section

Hope you all enjoyed episode 2 of ‘Easy Growing’. Please put your comments below the video. If you’re watching on Facebook, on YouTube, through our e-mail, (or this blog post)  we really, really want to hear what you have to say! We want to hear your questions, we want to be able to build this show into something that’s really, really useful for you. So please let us know what you think, add your questions or comments (comment section below). If you don’t want to put your question or comment below go ahead and send it directly to me. My e-mail is Bryan@GardenInMinutes.com. That’s Bryan with a Y. I’ll put it below the video so you can take a look and find it more easily. Other than that, hope you all have a wonderful day. Happy gardening!