Top 10 Cold Hardy Fall & Winter Crops to Grow In Your Garden + Reasons Why – Transcript

00:19What is going on, everyone? Welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the MI Gardener channel. I really hope you guys are going to enjoy this one because I absolutely am having a great day, so I hope you are as well. Today we're going to be doing a video that was actually requested to us by a viewer. That's right.

00:34We do lots of videos that are viewer requested, but if they get enough thumbs up, there's a reason why they're the most thumbed up comments, which is why we do the videos on them, because that means there's a lot of people that want to see that type of video. I had a comment that was asking us to talk about our top 10 winter vegetables, our top 10 fall and cold weather vegetables.

00:55I thought I'd do that video today because why not? You wanted to see it, so let's get it done. I thought I'd just jump right into it because it's 10. We got a short amount of time, so let's get on into it. My first one is lettuce. Also, the viewer asked me to talk about why I chose these ones.

01:14Let's talk about lettuce first. This is a crop that grows spring, summer, and fall. If you sow it correctly, we've done videos on that. It's an all-season crop. It also grows decently well in the winter. It'll survive in the winter. Let's put it that way. It doesn't really grow unless you have protection, in which we have our little caterpillar tunnel, which helps to provide that protection so that we can have harvest well into December and January.

01:38In comparison to other salad greens, lettuce is definitely one of the fastest growing greens. You can have it sprout and then pretty much ready to harvest in about 20 to 25 days if you're doing cut and come again lettuce, also depending on how cold the weather is. It's a very fast growing green.

01:53It's very cold, hardy, and it can survive very cold temperatures. I also really love lettuce because of its variety. One of the things that's so nice is planting out 10, 15 different varieties and pretty much having a salad bowl, one of those spring mix salad bowl mixes, the artisan salad bowl mixes that you pay tons for in the store.

02:11You can just take a knife and just go chop and you've got like $5 worth of lettuce right there. It's a huge money saver and it's really nice because it's fresh. It's from the garden. You can't beat it and it hasn't been chipped hundreds if not thousands of miles.

02:26The next one that I want to talk about is cilantro. Now cilantro is one that we have growing here and one that is really a big misconception. Cilantro is commonly seen as a warm weather vegetable because it's seen in a lot of Mexican cuisine and a lot of people use it in salsas and tacos and things that you kind of think of with summer.

02:46However, cilantro does not like the heat. Cilantro will bolt, which is why plant breeders for the longest time have been breeding cilantro to be more heat tolerant because it does bolt so quickly.

03:01In the cold weather, it lasts much longer. It keeps much more better flavor and it is one that we use so often in the garden that we can really utilize for a longer period of time in the fall and winter. It grows very well. It actually has built-in antifreeze.

03:19It's crazy. This whole bed was actually filled with frost. We got down to 27 degrees last night. The bed was completely flat with frost and then when the sun started coming up, you can kind of see it behind me there, it started touching these beds here and you can check out these lettuce or check out this cilantro here.

03:37Look at that. Nothing wrong with it. It's not dead. So many people think that it dies in the winter or dies in cold weather. It will die in the winter eventually. It's not super cold hardy, but it is definitely very cold hardy compared to other things in the garden and it's certainly not a warm weather green.

03:53I love this. Very high in vitamin C, very expensive in the store. Really has a short shelf life, so getting it fresh from the garden is most important, especially if you want good flavor. That's my second one. My third favorite are beets. I don't have to say much more about beets because they're pretty much the most loved fall and winter crop there is.

04:13Beets are very high in iron, which is great during the winter months. It helps with your immune system. They have a good storage life, especially when you pickle them or can them, but they can also be kept in the fridge for a very long time. There are root vegetables, so they can stay right in the ground.

04:29They do have built-in antifreeze with their leaves. Their leaves are edible as well. This makes them a multi-purpose crop because you can use both the leaves and the roots or the bulbs that are created, and that allows you to have two harvests from one plant, which is always a win in my book.

04:45My fourth favorite are carrots. Now I can't personally eat raw carrots because I am allergic to raw carrots. As weird as that seems, it's true, but raw carrots are just one of the only things I can't have raw, so I cook them, and it's totally fine. But carrots are a great crop to grow in fall and winter because you can leave them in the ground.

05:02I love crops that you can actually cover up with leaves and then throw a tarp on top, or throw grass clippings and then a tarp on top. Keep them thawed underground. You can pull the tarp off, rake the leaves back, and harvest your carrots well into winter. In fact, this is how the Amish and just people in general have been growing their carrots as well as potatoes, which we'll talk about for hundreds of years.

05:28It's nature's cold storage, so you can keep fresh carrots around well into January, even February before you start needing to harvest them. Now, again, this is just a very versatile crop, too, because the carrot itself has so many uses.

05:44Not only is it great fresh, it's very nutritious, very high in vitamin C and beta-carotene. It really helps you to get through the winter months, help you eat as seasonally as possible, which can help you get through flus and colds much better.

06:04It's also just such a great crop to add into any soup. We add carrots into everything that we cook pretty much. We do a roots roast, which is carrots, turnips, beets, and parsnips, and we will chop them all up, roast them in the oven.

06:20It's incredible. It's really, really delicious. You can't beat a roots roast. So that's what we love to use with carrots, but that's why it's our fourth favorite cold winter crop to grow. And the fifth cold weather crop that we really love to grow, are potatoes like I just talked about with carrots.

06:36They're a crop that you can leave in the ground or harvest if you want to do so. If you have the climate where it's not super wet and super cold where they're going to rot, you can leave them in the ground. And once you leave them in the ground, they're going to stay fresh as long as you keep them from freezing. So basically just cover it with leaves, throw a tarp on top, and you can harvest potatoes well into winter.

06:56And that's a great crop because it's very high in carbohydrates, really helps to warm the body up on a cold winter day. And they're great filler foods, very high in potassium. And they're just, they're so flavorful. And they have a wide variety of uses, whether it's mashed, roasted, baked, doesn't matter.

07:11Potatoes are a total home run in my book. So that's why they're number five. Number six, parsnips. Parsnips are so undervalued when it comes to just their benefit in the garden. And we didn't grow parsnips this year in this garden because we didn't have time to sow them.

07:27It just, we really ran out of time. But parsnips are ones that take a very long time to mature, about 100 to 110 days. However, they get sweeter as the fall approaches and even sweeter once they freeze. This makes them very delicious, extremely nutritious.

07:44And parsnips are ones that are extremely cold hardy, where you can basically keep them in the ground much like carrots. And because they're so cold hardy, they have a lot of minerals and nutrients which makes them very nutritious. Again, those are one of those ingredients we throw into our roots roast, which is one of our favorite things to do in the winter.

08:00It's something that just has a very earthy, nutty flavor, but it adds a sweetness as well. This is just, it's unparalleled with any other root crop you're going to grow. And also, you get a lot of bang for your buck. One parsnip might be two to two and a half pounds.

08:15They're big, you know, they're big roots, unlike carrots, and they're also much more, they're much more, you know, there's a whole lot stronger, I guess you could say, than a carrot. Carrots, if they hit something, they get all squirrely and wiggly and messed up, which is one of the downsides to growing carrots, but one of the upsides to growing parsnips is you get all the benefits of a carrot, plus they really don't care what's down there.

08:39They're going to get through it. So it's a great crop to grow. And that's why it's number six. Number seven, cabbage. Cabbage is not seen as a fall and winter crop. However, it is a great fall and winter crop because of the fact that the tight heads of cabbage allow it to have a very long shelf life.

08:56We've kept cabbage fresh in our fridge once we harvested it for almost three months. This is absolutely incredible. The outer leaves just need to be peeled back. They kind of turn yellow and get a little wrinkly and withered, but the fresh leaves inside are still as fresh and just as nutritious as the day you pick them.