Winter Garden Update

The winter garden is coming along great! The cabbage are finally starting to form heads. The collards are reaching for the sky, and the broccoli are ready to harvest! 

Warmer than usual temperatures, and lots of rain this winter, have encouraged the plants to keep growing, rather than fall into a dormant stage due to cold.

 It would have been nice to be harvesting these vegetables late in the fall and early winter, but we don't have a problem waiting until spring.


By every best guess, and the Almanac,  it doesn't look like we are going to have any more winter weather in this area of Georgia.

Although I would delight in a surprise snowstorm or even an ice storm, I'll be happy to settle for these cooler, gardenable temperatures for as long as they will last! 

We didn't plant a lot or a big variety in the fall. We always talk about planting a greater variety of vegetables, but broccoli, collards, and cabbage are staples to our diet. 


Carrots, parsnips, turnips, and other winter crops are something we don't consume a lot of. It would be interesting to grow them at some point, for the experience, but we just haven't taken that step yet.

I'm starting to think about radishes, peas, and beans. The mild temperatures, sunny days, and lack of frost and freeze threat are encouraging.

I did grow rutabagas and kohlrabi last spring, and we enjoyed eating those. I might try those crops again.

My herbs are thriving in the greenhouse,  and I'm anxious to bring them back out to my front deck, but I might be a little ahead of myself on that that. A sudden cold snap might be disastrous!

Speaking of the greenhouse, we still have productive tomato plants and bell pepper plants! This is the longest we've had them in the greenhouse. A serious hard freeze usually does them in by January.


The other day, John and I were speculating that, had we known we were going to have such a mild winter, we might have continued with our in-ground summer crops longer. With only the addition of a row cover and some mulch during cold spells, we might have been able to carry the crops deep into winter. We'll never know, but the experiment might have produced some interesting results.

Speculation aside, we are grateful that John's father, when he established this little piece of Heaven, saw fit to put a greenhouse on the property. Being able to extend our growing season means a lot to us, and although we are not yet using the greenhouse to it's fullest capacity (it needs some work), it is still a very valuable part of our gardening efforts.

In the final picture here, you see our rooster pen, also called the garden pen. Originally, there was a chicken pen here. My husband, who believes in chicken portability, moved the chickens, and the area became my well-fertilized spring garden last year.

Ah, yes, I remember fondly the onions, garlic, Swiss chard, cabbage, kohlrabi, and rutabagas! But, I digress.

When the veggies were all gone, and before I had a chance to think about planting anything else, John had turned my garden into a make-shift chicken pen once again. And the summer and the winter have passed.

Oh, well, this little 20' x 20' plot of well-fertilized amended Georgia clay will be a garden once again, just in time for spring, and just as soon as these pesky roosters meet their maker at Darby Farms sometime later this month!

The Winter Garden is Thriving!

So, while the sun was out and shining for a few minutes the other day, I grabbed my camera and ran out to get a few pictures of our winter garden.

Everyone always says to get the plants in the ground in August, but we never seem to get them in before September, which means we don't get a fall harvest by November. Instead, the veggies winter over, and we get a great harvest in the spring. This year it will be collards, cabbage, and broccoli.


In the winter months of 2009, we had a pretty significant snow for this area. 3-4 inches, and it covered the garden completely. I went out and started knocking snow off the broccoli plants, then decided to leave it. I wanted to see if the plants were really hardy, and guess what, they were! The broccoli and all the plants came through the snow and cold and gave us an excellent harvest in the spring.

Hey, everybody, look really close at the last photo. Look through the dead tomato vines, to the other side of the fence. See that little brown spot in the middle of the picture? That's my new
puppy, Samantha. She's a bit upset because she can't get into the garden with me. Samantha is
a mini-dachshund, and I got her in early December. She is so wonderful! She blesses us all, especially my father. She has kept him laughing and entertained daily, and that's good because he doesn't have time to get sad missing my mother. That's why, in an earlier post this week, I called her medicine to my soul. She's medicine to all of us!

Five Acre Farm

I've been living in Georgia for 13 years. The last seven of those years have been spent here at Five Acre Farm, just northeast of Atlanta. Winters here have been varied, usually cold, with some warm spells, sometimes cold and wet, and usually, just before winter takes its last bow, we get a light snow or ice storm in late February or early March.

This year, however, winter has been exceptionally warm, and frequently wet. For the most part, temperatures have remained in the 60s, even the 70s, and rainy. Every couple of weeks we've had a cold spell, with rain, and temperatures dropping into the 50s, 40s, or even as low as the upper 30s for a couple of days at a time. When it isn't raining, it's usually overcast more days than not.

We had a huge storm yesterday morning, and then, surprisingly, the sun came out for just a little while. I ran outside with my camera and took a few pictures of the house and garden. I don't have many clear shots of the house. In the spring and summer the trees and flowering bushes are so full, you can hardly see the house.

As you can see from the photo above, the house isn't some romantic old farmhouse (I wish). It's just a manufactured home that my late father-in-law placed on the land when he cleared it some 27 years ago. His vision was not a working farm, but a comfortable home and a little bit of land to work when he felt like it.

My father-in-law's landscape plan for the area around the house was ingenious! The first rays of morning sun come up from the bottom of our property, the bulk of which is beyond that bank of naked forsythia bushes in the photo at left. Even in the hottest part of summer, it can be reasonably cool at the back of the house early in the morning. The sun is practically over the house before we feel the real heat, and that's a good thing since the summertime sun in Georgia is hot and intense!

At the front of the house, which faces southwest, a bank of tall Poplar trees, naked in the wintertime, let the warm rays of sun through; but in the summertime, when they're full, they block the harshest rays and provide a rich, dappled shade that lets in just enough sunlight to feed the camelia bushes, azaleas, crepe myrtles, and other flowering plants. Besides being beautiful and comfortable, this layout of the property means our heating and air conditioning bills are very modest, which works for us on our limited income.

Here are a few older shots of the farm in spring and summer.
(Left) View from the road, looking up the driveway. (Right) Azaleas and Camelias blooming at the front of the house. (Below Left) The back of the house. (Below Right) The Poplar trees in the front.