Tolly’s rambles on … winter

Winter veg withered by frost!

Every year in the UK we face an environmental disaster of mega proportions, known as winter. In our climate nothing actually grows between October and March.

Crops planted during the growing season (April – October) need to be harvested and stored in buildings or over-wintered in the field to be harvested fresh. Winter weather always brings its challenges with vegetable production and we have had over four decades of experience with this annual event. Always looking for suitable crops to survive the inclement weather, Kalettes have been a great new vegetable for winter and early spring. Our polytunnels help to provide some fresh salads during the bleaker months but even here in the warmer protected environment growth is non-existent during the darkest months of December and January. It is not so much the low temperatures that cause the problems, it is the lack of sunshine and light.

Over the past decade we have had generally very mild winter weather with much reduced frosts, this has certainly helped to improve the survival rates of some of our field crops and reduce winter losses. This winter has been very different though, we have experienced very high temperatures and light levels right up to early December, encouraging some crops to continue growing well past their normal season.

This looked good at the time, but we have since realised that this is not so great after all, as crops become over-sized, soft and tender. A rapid drop of temperature came in mid-December before the crops were able to shut themselves down and prepare for winter. Temperatures plummeted from 15C to –8C in just a few days and the extreme cold persisted for well over a week.

In a “normal” winter this degree of cold does not happen before mid-January and crops losses are generally very low. Plants are able to cope with low temperatures, if they have had the time to do so. We have a variety of Cabbage – January King – bred originally over 130 years which is tough and hardy able to withstand the worst of UK winters, but this year it has been badly damaged by the frosty weather. Some of our root crops have also suffered badly in the brief cold snap. We had just started on our third succession of cauliflower, when the frost killed all of the crop, almost 800 cauliflowers lost.

It is a long time since we have seen such losses and it puts us in a position of scarcity of some vegetables for the rest of the winter. In store we have plenty of potatoes, squash and onions, safe in their winter quarters. Salads will start again soon in the tunnels and in the field we have heaps of lovely leeks, kale will start to grow soon, Kalettes seem to go on for ever and celeriac in the ground we think is OK and some cabbage can be recovered.

One of our biggest losses was several tonnes of beetroot that we had planned to donate to FareShare.

So if you were getting bored with beetroot it is now off the menu!