Grow Salad Greens All Winter For Less Than 20 Dollars | Gardening Tips | Roots and Refuge

hello friends my name is Jess welcome back to roots in refuge farm today I want to show you guys a trick I learned years ago to help you grow a little bit of food over the winter months I actually haven't utilized this trick in a long time is this is something I learned when I lived in town whenever I grew food and pots on my back porch and a lady that I went to church with grew her greens this way and I was thinking about it the other day I've had a lot of people messaged me asking hey what are your plans for overwintering what are your plans for growing your food in the winter and one thing that I hate paying full price for at the store is salad greens because they are so easy to grow all different kinds like baby spinach is baby kales baby chard all of these things I mean they come to maturity during the warmer months in just a few weeks it might take a little bit longer through the winter when there's not as much sunlight but still they're frost Hardy a lot of times down to like 15 degrees I have harvested kale out from underneath the snow before now it does stunt its growth to not get the amount of light that it would get during the spring and summer so you have to take that into consideration when you're planting these things you're not going to get them as quickly as you would in the warmer months however today I just want to show you this really quick and affordable trick that you can do to have salad greens all winter long no matter what your living situation is if you're in a rental where your landlord has told you you can't put in a garden you can still do this if you're in an apartment where you have a back patio area or a porch you can do this or if you're in a rural setting like this you've got a small farm but you just want to situate something up by your door that'll be easy to maintain and easy to harvest when it's really cold outside you can do this right here I've got a few things most of which you may already have laying around your house first I've got a box cutter of course you can use scissors too I have a screwdriver that I'm gonna use to poke holes in this bag and and you could use any pokey thing and I have a plastic container this is a 90 quart container it was something around like $7 at Walmart you could get any of them you could get one that's larger than this you just want to match it to about the size of your bag of soil that you're gonna have I have a couple taxes seeds and here I have a one and a half cubic foot pack organic potting mix baby greens are just things that you cut young I mean like if you plant charred seeds it'll grow into big charred stalks like you know you've seen in markets and grocery stores however if you cut them off whenever they're just a few weeks old when they're this this long you would call that a baby green it's not a specific variety it's not something that's marketed for that sometimes you will find seed packets from companies that says like salad mix or mesclun mix baby greens mix all that is is a variety of seeds of larger plants that they advise you to plant much closer together and harvest much sooner however if you were to spread those seeds out give them ample space and the time to grow into full size plants they would so today I'm gonna be planting flashy Butterick lettuce and mizuna red Street mustard I got these seeds at Baker Creek and my gardener one thing you can grow in this container is kale if you are wanting to grow those a little bit larger and not just harvesting them very small for salads you just want to space them out a little bit more I'm gonna be sowing these things really did sleep because I am going to be harvesting these very young for the purpose of eating and salads throughout the the winter months if you like spicy arugula and mustards are a really good option but if you want something a little more mild I would stick with the butter crunchy romaine type lettuces or kale chard has kind of that earthy flavor basically what we're doing here is we are using the bag that the potting soil came in as a container for this container garden and we're going to use this tub inverted as a greenhouse the reason why we're doing this instead of simply putting the soil in the tub and planting in the tub what you could do but one if I did that I would have to poke holes in this tub for drainage therefore ruining it to ever be used for any other purpose the other thing is is that I would need a clear lid if I did that because otherwise I wouldn't be able to put the little in this and have the same amount of exposure to the Sun my bag of soil here and the first thing that I'm going to do is on one side I'm going to put some drainage holes directly in the back [Music] now this doesn't have to be crazy you're not gonna do it wrong you just want to make sure that the water can get out of this bag so I don't know how many that is they're just a few inches apart spaced all over this side of the bag and the next thing I'm going to do is turn this over set of holes facing down on the lid of my container now if you don't have a lid if you just have a container with no lid you could do this directly on the ground and just leave the bag laying on the ground you could do it on a table you could do it on another surface the reason why I'm gonna go ahead and leave it sitting on the lid is because it'll just make it a little easier to move where I can get up underneath it carry it around on this lid so I've got a box cutter and what I'm gonna do on this side is try to flatten my bag out a little bit so that it's not all walking and I'm actually just going to cut the top of this plastic off on this bag I'm not cutting into the sides as you can see I've got just kind of a panel cut out where I'm leaving the sides good and intact because I want them to hold this soil I might have even cut that one just a little bit lower so I'm gonna give this side a little bit more space you can grow greens in a bag like this all year you can grow a lot of things in a bag like this obviously nothing with really deep roots this won't work for carrots I wouldn't try this for things peppers or tomatoes like tender things because if it gets really cold this type is probably not gonna keep things up above 32 degrees it's probably not gonna keep this soil super warm but it suffices for frost Hardy varieties like greens and lettuce I've got this panel cut out I'll show you guys right here I've got my panel cut out I probably shoulda left a little bit more room on this side to make sure it holds the soil in but as you can see over here I left a little more space and then probably be a little neater in the long run that way okay so I've got a little cultivator tool and all I'm doing here is just breaking this soil up because they tend to get a little bit compacted when you're dealing with bad soil if your soil really was packed in and breaking it up makes it like protrude massively out the bag like this was actually somewhat compacted and as you can see it's kind of like made this soil taller than the edges in my bag I'm just gonna remove a little bit of this oh hello kitten George I'm not doing anything here I'm just gonna remove a little bit no kidding George go on go on go on shoo shoo I went and got a pot because upon breaking up this soil as you can tell there's kind of a lot more than what this bag comfortably holds held open it was just packed in there so I'm just gonna remove a little bit of this soil so that whenever I water this I don't have to worry about my seeds getting washed away I want this to be nice and loose and fitting in my open bags it feels good to get my hands dirty this time of year doesn't offer just a whole lot of planting and I'll put some potatoes in soon some garlic and that might be it for the next couple of months okay I feel good about how this looks so I've got my waste soil in my bag cut open holes on bottom and now I need to plant that's what we call a garden manicure out there I'm gonna go wash these so I can touch my camera and show you guys what we're doing lettuce seeds are tiny and if you are wanting to plant them for head lettuce you want to space them out but in this case planting them knowing that we're going to harvest them as baby greens you can sow them really close together now baby greens are often called cut and come again green salad greens a lot of times it'll say cut and come again and what that means is you can harvest these salad greens more than once and they continue to grow back the thing is you don't want to just clear cut across the entire thing taking every single leaf that's there you want to kind of pick some here and there throughout it because you need to leave you know at least 25% of the plant or so for it to continue to be able to photosynthesize and grow if you cut all of the leaves off sometimes just a little nub that you leave will grow back but it takes a really long time it's best if you're growing greens like this where you have this one bag that's gonna be full of greens to come in and kind of pick your salad greens throughout the entire thing instead of just grabbing a whole bunch from one area that way your plants can continue to grow and you can continue to harvest salads throughout the season so I've got my seeds here and essentially what you do with really tiny seeds like this is you surface sow them and I'll show you what that looks like since I'm going to plant two varieties in my bag I'm just going to stick half of this bag I'm gonna plant as my butter oak lettuce and I'm just going to sew it right across the surface I'm going to use this entire pot since these are going to be harvested as baby greens I'm not worried about them being too close together and I just take my hand and just spread those out and I'm just covering those up super lightly I'm not trying to sink them down in in or anything like that we just want to barely cover it up with soil I'm going to take a little bit of my soil out of my pot here and sprinkle it on top we cover them too much they won't germinate so now I'm going to do the other side with my mustard my soil is pretty wet because it got rained on a couple days ago so I'm not gonna water it right now but at this point you would normally water this with a watering can something that's gonna be a really light stream of water you don't want to get hose aren't you're gonna misplace all your seeds nothing that's going to displace the soil and to finish off our project I'm just going to my greenhouse if you have some warm days or if you're getting just a ton of condensation in here if it's just super humid and you're concerned about it you can just bring something out and just barely prop this out to allow some airflow that really is just going to depend on the region that you're in the kind of weather that you're having here in Arkansas we're still having days in the 60s and our nights are only getting down into the 40s so I could probably do that I'm going to leave it down just to see what happens I'm kind of curious to see how it does right now with this particular mix now don't forget because you are covering up the entirety of this thing with non-permeable substance that you have to water these the rain is not going to do the job with these little bitty seeds that's actually kind of a beneficial thing here at the beginning because one heavy rain could wash all your seeds out so you do want to keep it mostly covered or prompt and till these things really take root and after that if you're having warm days and you feel like it's gonna be okay you can take it off if you get to where you're growing these greens you know let's say we're getting into like January and it's really cold but your greens are still doing well in there and you want to keep them going and your concern that you're gonna be getting down I'm talking like into like the single digits or below where you might actually start threatening a cold hardy plant like these baby greens one thing you can do to help maintain some of the warmth in here that it's gonna gather up from the Sun is just mound up some hay or some straw around the edges you could even use leaves just something that you have around your yard that will help retain some of the heat into this soil so if you just mound it up around the edges and whenever you have to access it move them out of the way access your greens for watering or picking and then cover it back up and mound the mulch back up around it it's the same concept of mulching if you had these things planted in a bed so there we have it a really simple project that you can do and like less than 10 minutes with less than $20 worth of materials you probably have a tub like that laying around your house you might even have an extra bag of soil left over from earlier on in the year but if you do have to go buy this stuff brand new I spent $14 on this project not including the seeds which I did already have one thing to remember that you want to place this in full Sun you don't put it in a place that's going to be shady because the winter months do already have such shorter daylight hours you want to find a spot that's going to get as much fun as possible secondly don't forget to water if you are the type of person that forgets to water things put it up by your front door put it on your porch put it somewhere where you're going to walk past that way you won't neglect it and let it dry up other than that enjoy your salad greens if you have a desire in your heart to grow food please just start even small things like this make a big difference in the long run because while this isn't going to make a huge dent in your grocery bill it will be incorporating food that you grew into your diet it will be encouraging to you that you are able to do something I'm telling you just start if you want to grow your food you can grow your food and you should grow your food it's such an encouraging thing to maintain any level of food sustainability and I always say this whenever I'm eating that salad here in a couple of months I'm gonna be so glad that I planted it today thank you guys so much for watching I bless you until next time [Music]

Channel: Roots and Refuge Farm

Views: 1,235,600

Rating: 4.930553 out of 5

Keywords: fall gardening, growing salad, season extension, lettuce growing tips, how to grow lettuce, grow your own food, how to grow vegetables in the winter, how to grow food, small farm, gardening, how to grow food in your backyard, roots and refuge, roots and refuge garden, container gardening, beginner gardening, how to start gardening, homesteading, gardening vlog, gardening advice, growing in winter, tub greenhouse, diy greenhouse, tote greenhouse

Id: 7IXn2t8GLh0

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 27 2018