ok, my landlady took away my sun, and my brussels sprouts are growing too slow to make it by thanksgiving. I'm in New Haven, CT. Is it possible to overwinter them? They are on a raised bed. my broccoli and cauliflower are in a similar situation, but I don't care about those as much. wal-mart broccoli tastes the same.
I'd be more concerned about the temps. Brussel sprouts thrive here on the coast where I am. It rains for 8 months straight. We have a weeks worth of rain hitting us tomorrow night. The first of many. Don't think its a water problem unless the roots are drowning from improper drainage. Shorter days will diminish the available light and slow growth results. x
so should I give up for this season, and try to mulch them all the way so they are ready to go in the spring? Ideally, I would transplant them to the community garden, but I've grown attached and the community garden is less sheltered. Dammit, this sucks. I had great sun until my landlady built this privacy lattice for herself which she doesn't even need. I'm thinking I will plant something ugly as hell in the spring for her to look at.
brussel sprouts do best when over wintered.. if your concerned about the dead of winter,heavy mulch,mini green houses are options for the coldest of cold days and when it snows..
thanks hippie. Should I go out and get some, or will a bunch of leaves do? I can go out to agway, but it might get expensive to mulch the whole bed. I put down a bunch of fresh compost from my hot pile. I'm thinking maybe a few layers of cardboard (we have tons of boxes left over from moving that i've been using as worm bedding), followed by the cheapest agway mulch, followed by leaves, but do they need to be older leaves, and do I need to run them through a machine? I don't have access to a machine, so if so, I will just go with the agway mulch, but i'm worried because it is cedar. On the bright side it is somewhat composted already, not like the very raw mulch they have at the big box. My municipality has no free mulch available. There's carrots in there too (I used the square foot method so it's a pretty crowded bed, and I did want to be able to access them all winter, but I can forgo that if it means saving the sprouts.
As long as its a raised bed, why not encase the whole thing in plastic? A few sticks of wood or fiberglass, a cheap roll of plastic, you're all set. Just make a tent over it. You can secure it with bricks or even duct tape or velcro. As for mulch, you can get a bale of peat moss for cheap at local garden shops, etc. A bale goes a long way. Newspaper will work too. If you have a lawnmower with a catcher, you can toss the newpaper underneath and get it chopped up x
Thanks xexon! I'll try the plastic. I don't have it in me to make a cold frame for a rental unit, although I would love to piss off that bitch of a landlady. I think I'll go with the plastic. Do I even need to bother letting light through? Never done this before. Just returned from agway with 4 cubic feet of something called "mainely mulch". It is chopped straw and hay. Nothing but the best for my babies!
dont worry about protecting them at all till your looking at prolonged temperatures below freezing(more than just a few hours). they will tolerate frosts well.. let them get as much light as you can till its time to put them to bed for the winter..maybe use the plastic for the really cold nights but then remove when the temps get above freezing. being your in CT and i assume you will have a prolonged period of snow cover i wouldnt use the plastic for the long term.i would just mulch them heavily before the first snow then just leave them be till the thaw..
i'm not sure what kind of snow cover we get... I am right on the coast. I'd ask the landlady but she is clueless anyway. she wasn't even going to tell me about the treated wood! some of it is from the 80's, when treated wood was REALLY nasty. I had turnips growing right next to it.
im sure most of the arsenic has long since dissipated i wouldnt worry about 25 year old lumber leaching any measurable amounts into your soil. if snow cover may not be a issue,just mulch heavily when its clear the temps are not getting above freezing for a while and leave them be till spring..
i don't know man, if the arsenic is gone, why aren't the bugs eating it? I don't trust any wood that doesn't decompose. My father is chemical crazy. He worked for an agro-chem competitor to Monsanto when i was growing up, and I was indoctrinated to believe organic gardening was a waste of resources. When HE warned me not to eat the root vegetables near the treated lumber, that set off some alarm bells. Hopefully, you are right, but just in case, I am not feeding that stuff to my wife. Thanks for the mulching tips! I am so excited to have homegrown sprouts!
So if you found me in your bug out shelter, growing crops already, we'd have nothing to fight about... DON'T MESS WITH ME SPROUTS! Funny how much I hated them as a kid.
