Reply To: Growing Your Own Food: Off-Grid Gardening and Permaculture in Winter

[WrethaOffGrid]

In winter, my garden, like most people (I believe), tends to slow down. I manage to keep a few perennial herbs going all winter, specifically garlic chives and chocolate mint. The chives are in a protected place, so they don’t tend to be bothered too much by the cold, and the mint I grow in a pot, so I bring it up into a mostly enclosed space next to a large window. It gets cold, but as long as I remember to water it before a hard freeze, it’s still out there, bright green and cheery the following morning.

Being in the high desert mountains in far west Texas, we can have some bitterly cold nights, but generally, as long as the sun comes out during the day, the temps tend to warm up nicely, even up into the 50s or 60s F. One of the things I do have to watch out for is the wildlife. We don’t typically have larger critters, mainly because of the fenced yard and the dogs, but the smaller ones, mice, voles, squirrels, and the occasional skunk, will take advantage of my unguarded plants overnight, especially when everything else is dry and crispy. I have some wire enclosing my garlic chives, which keeps most of the smaller critters at bay, and there is a bit of chives that have seeded outside of the wire enclosure so the mice do have something they can get to if they wish.

Oh, I almost forgot; I have a few random green onions that grow in a sort of window box just outside of my living room. I will buy a few green onions in spring from the grocery store, I’ll leave an inch or so of the root end and stuff it into the dirt. By mid-summer, my planter box is brimming with green onions, I’ll chop a bit for a meal and leave the rest. I do have to compete with the mice, sometimes, it gets pretty heated, and I have to take action against the mice. Honestly, I’m surprised that there are any onions left out there right now. There are only a few but they are still growing, and if I think about them, I’ll take scissors in hand and snip some greenery to add to a dish.