Fall is something like sailing in the Local Food Project garden. With a late swell of warm weather into October, we continued to harvest from our last planting of tomatoes, all the while keeping an eye on the forecast. The moment we hear the phrase “lows in the high thirties”, we pluck all the tomato fruits, whether light pink or still completely green, and then set them on indoor racks. This gives us another couple weeks of tomatoes, as they slowly ripen in the warm indoor environment. Want to hasten the ripening process? Just place a few green tomatoes in a paper bag with a couple banana peels. The gasses released from the peels speed along red beauties.

As the threat of frost approaches, we unroll “floating row cover”, a light woven fabric sheet material that can be draped over plants to offer them a little more protection from the first light frosts of the Fall. Here in Northern Virginia, if you can sneak your vegetable garden past the first couple frosts, where the thermometer just reaches freezing before the sun begins to rise, the crystal dew will stick to the fabric blanket over the plants, not the plants themselves. This makes all the difference for lettuce heads and herbs like dill, which can handle cooler temps, but not frozen leaves, especially when the wind picks up. The key to successful use of “floating row cover” is to have the fabric weighted down with rocks or bricks on both sides of a vegetable bed, so you don’t end up with what looks like giant toilet paper draped in the trees.

We also use hoops made out of steel wire to keep the fabric above the garden plants and create a sheltered mini-climate that can breathe and allow moisture to evaporate during the day. Keeping leaves dry is the key to cool-weather gardening.

If we want to take our cool weather garden adventure a step further, we need something more than vegetable blankets, something sturdy that can handle blasts of winter, and even snow. For a small garden, we might be talking about a cold-frame, but for a larger garden project or a small farm, we are talking about a greenhouse.

This Fall we are in the process of constructing a 2100 square foot hoop-house, which is essentially a larger and stronger version of the little hoops over our garden beds. In this case, the thick steel arches form a gothic greenhouse, and when covered with a couple sheets of plastic form the perfect environment for year-round food production.



In late October, the Local Food Project hosted master farmer Steve Moore for a two-day workshop on unheated, passive-solar greenhouses. Steve Moore has spent over twenty years working on systems of food production in the ground, under the cover of a gothic shaped shelter that captures as much sunlight and heat as possible, without any additional fossil fuel heat. By combining good design with the proper vegetable varieties, such a greenhouse can crank out healthy vegetables in January. Plants that are already cool-hardy like greens and salad mixes can grow in the dead of winter, and as the sun rises and the greenhouse begins to warm rapidly, it can provide a two-month head start to summer crops like tomatoes and peppers. During the workshop, participants learned the principles behind Steve’s passive solar design, but actually got out to the garden and started putting up the structure.





So just when we thought the season was coming to an end, here at the Local Food Project, we find ourselves at a beginning. The year-round garden has arrived at Airlie Center.