Keep your gardening spirit alive this winter! Learn to grow fresh greens in creative ways, even using your car’s warmth.
It’s chilly, which is short for: “I am wearing five layers of clothing each time I go out into the garden”. I’m also suffering from “gardener’s withdrawal”
Our garden has decent numbers of winter lettuce, perennial leeks, spinach, silver beet, lemons, native limes and much more, all ready to be picked and eaten. But I want to grow something, not just pick it.
Luckily, there is an easy way to grow your greens, or reds, even in winter. All you need is daylight (or a grow light that will give the right light for plants to grow), a baking tray, good compost or potting mix, water, seaweed-based fertiliser or home-made compost water.
First things fi rst, choose what you’d like to grow (and eat). I like non-hearting lettuce, especially the curly red ones and the green-leafed ones that look like rabbit ears. Also celery, spinach, silver beet, basil, snow peas, watercress and any of the many Chinese greens such as bok choi or Chinese celery. Look at the back of the seed packet to see which ones are labelled “suitable for cold climates”. You might also like to try pea seeds, not for a crop of peas, but to eat their crunchy tops.
Hunt down an old baking dish or similar container; don’t put holes in the base, as you usually would — you don’t want these to leak. Fill with potting mix, then sprinkle on the seeds about three times as thickly as recommended. Ruffle the top to cover the seeds lightly, then water well — the moisture should penetrate just to the base or slightly above it, but not puddle there.
All you need now is light, plus either:
- A table on a frost-free sunny patio, the kind that feels like a concrete desert during summer.
- A table by a sunny window — at least six hours of direct sunlight a day, preferably in a room that’s kept warm during the day.
A bench with a grow light, expensive but a good investment if you want fresh greens (or even tomatoes) through winter.
Your car. I’m serious. Car parks are hot, absorbing and radiate heat. Every morning, pick up your mini garden, drive it to work and, assuming you park in sunlight, place the garden on the dashboard, shut the doors and wait for the car to heat up during the day. At the end of the day, take your mini garden indoors. If you don’t have a car, or if you park underground, ask a friend who does have a car in a parking lot most days if they will let you use some of the unwanted stored heat to grow veg. In summer, I use this method to dry slices of fruit, placed on oiled wire so they don’t stick to the wire and stain the dashboard. In a week or two, I have dried peach or apricot slices.
The other wonderful winter veg to grow now is onions. If you haven’t eaten homegrown onions, you won’t know how sweet and fl avourful they can be. Buy onion seedlings, rather than onion seed for a faster result. Grow them in the garden for nice, fat onion bulbs. If you are going to grow them to pick and grow again, plant spring onion.
Pick your winter veg as soon as they look worth eating and use scissors to limit damage to the plant. They won’t be planted deeply so can be easily uprooted. Water often and well and keep doing it.
Lettuce can be grown large enough for a tossed salad, with some celery tops for fl avour. You won’t get celery stems, but you will get wonderfully tender celery tops, not stringy at all, with pale green immature leaves that are far more delicious than the big tough mature plants.
Once spring is in full bloom, most of your “cut and come again” will go to seed. The lettuce may even turn bitter. There’s not much you can do about this, except keep your potted garden cooler as the season warms up. The spring onions will last for years, though. Plant them out in the garden, or into a bigger permanent pot, and keep snipping them, feeding them and enjoying them. The white bases can be sautéed like onions, the green can be fi nely chopped to add to lettuce or tabouli salads and much more.
Of course, you can also put concrete tubs on your sunny patio and hang baskets full of veg next to a north-facing, sunny wall. But if you want to keep the kids amused and show them that you really can grow the food we eat anywhere, do try the “garden in a car”.
