Winter Greens

From Wanting Fresh Greens to Using Words of Wisdom

“Can’t never could do nothing.”

I first heard these words from Tyler Roots as he bravely quoted his father’s words at his memorial service.

If you have the heart of an artist, then you must understand the contained lesson. My artist culture looks for the exceptions, not as rebellion but as exploration through expression. This creates comments and judgement by many as weird. But I find this way of being exciting a constant exploration. And it always ends for me in "Could be better" — that is my mantra.

As example, my new work as an artist is in horticulture, and the ‘can’t’ in Colorado’s Zone 5 climate is growing green produce, during the winter months from November to May, without investing a great deal of resources in hydrocarbons.

You ‘can’t’ do that — it gets too cold, and you get too short of days.

Well I can’t change the duration of daylight, but I thought perhaps there is something to be done in passive solar to up the temperature and prevent frozen crop.

Now I just want to come right out and say that I didn’t pull this off without using some fossil fuel. I used plastic products such as PVC, and 4 ply poly. But the PVC will last a lot of seasons and the poly was left over scrap from other projects. 

On the web I learned of the work of Eliot Coleman who wrote, The Winter Harvest Book about growing veggies year round.

So this is my first effort at extending season, and as my neighbor Michael pointed out—it’s only seed, what’s to lose? Hell, worse case scenario is I create lettuce popsicle and I learn something.

So I did some research. I chose to grow a cold crop such as lettuce that can thrive during shorter days and cooler temperatures, FYI, I also had a lot of harvested seed to play with. I knew better than to grow a Mediterranean culture such as tomatoes because that lose vitality at about 45 F degrees.

PVC 1/2 pipe just stuck in the ground about 6" each end covered with 4 mil poly with the perimeter held down with scrap

Then I covered the ground with frost row cover fabric, this photo taken in November
 

Well it seems to be working, I wouldn't want to have to try and feed my family year around with this new technology of mine, but I wouldn't say I couldn't.