What does your community garden do to prepare for winter?

With the onset of winter weather we are finding out who the die hard gardeners are at our community garden. Some of the beds are well cared for in spite of the cold weather and are growing a nice winter vegetable crop. Others have frost burnt eggplant and tomato plants with no sign of tending since the weather got cold. I suspect we'll have a rule for next fall to ask gardeners to either plant a winter crop (and tend it) or plant a cover crop. My aunt in Germany in required to clean up her garden at the end of fall and "put it to bed" for the winter or risk losing her allotment.

For those of you that garden in a community garden, do you garden through the winter? If you live in an area under snow in the winter, how do you put the group garden to bed?

I've attached a photo of the cabbage patch in my garden bed. This was taken on Dec 23rd. You can see the frost burnt eggplant and tomato plants in the background. The SF Bay area is generally considered a "Mediterranean" climate. We've had unusually high temperatures last summer and unusually cold temperatures this winter. We don't normally have a week of temperatures in the low 20s F but did so last week.

Beautiful cabbage Mermaid. I am continuing to garden until spring or the sale of my community garden, which ever comes first. I have planted lots of garlic, onions, lettuces, broccoli, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, spinach, kale, and more swiss chard, celery and still have some cool weather tomatoes producing quite nicely.

Happy to hear you are still able to garden a bit. Lovely crop you have there.
Any luck on finding an alternate place(s) for your community garden?

I have met a lot of rejection from some of the "nicer" gardens, being told that they have a 4-6year waiting list. I found a property not too far from where I live, and I am trying to find out who the owner is to take steps in starting a new community garden.

kanita

Kanita, I wish you all the best in the New Year. I'll hold positive thoughts that a new piece of ground comes your way soon.

Thanks Mermaid, I did get a new space in Santa Monica. It is beautiful and I really love it. The space is really large, and after a year, I can get another space. Everyone's plots are so gorgeous. And I also found space in another garden that is near my warehouse in the Valley, so I am so happy that I have two back up gardens. I will continue to garden in my first garden until we have to leave, but in the meantime I am getting my new garden plots ready as well.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!

That is great news! Happy New Year!

The one we garden at lets us pick until first HARD frost and then the owner releases his horses (they do the preliminary cleanup). Once they are done he removes whatever is left. ..... except the newly deposited fertilizer. Then he adds older manure and tills it in.

This message was edited Jan 15, 2007 8:10 PM

Up here in Wisconsin there is no such thing as a "winter crop," so this may not be applicable to your question... :-) The rule for our community garden is that you have to have your plot "cleaned up" by some date after frost (usually late October), or risk losing it. (I'm not exactly sure what "cleaned up" means though, because many people just leave last year's dead remnants lying around until spring.) A group of people walk around the plots at the end of the year, and if anybody's plot looks really bad they contact the person and warn them.

"Cleaned up" usually means clearing out debris from the summer/fall crop by either putting it in the compost bin or turning it under the soil & mulching so that the garden looks "neat" during the snow season.
We had a few garden members who just stopped coming when the weather turned cold. We had unusually low temps and hard frost here. The garden admins published an announcement that each bed owner had two weeks from date of announcement to remove the frost burnt plants and clean up their beds.

We have several composters placed through the community garden.
Most people have removed the debris and the raised boxes are left bare over the winter.

Great ideas! Our garden is doing a few things. We have almost two acres so the size determines what we can do to a large extent. We're receviing truckloads of leaves from Wake Forest University as they ran out of places to dump. These leaves will be moved to the fields by volunteers. We also planted onions and plan to plant garlic. Otherwise, the garden is resting. We will continue to distributed leaf mulch we got from the city onto our raised beds where lettuce is still growing .

We're a Food bank garden so maybe we will harvest some lettuce this week (if it stops raining).

That is good to increase the organic content of the soil.
They filled the raised boxes so full that it would necessitate removing some soil etc.
And the soil is somewhat fozen so will wait until spring to add organic content.
Caroline zone 3 Calgary