Winter vegetable garden: 15 vegetables to harvest from November to March

The vegetables you harvest in January are sown in summer, sometimes as early as spring. In December, a bed in Liège receives ten times less energy from the sun than in June. In midwinter, almost nothing grows. The winter vegetable garden is therefore a larder to fill before November.

Why everything is decided between March and September

In winter, a plant outside lives on its summer reserves. The RMI figures for Liège show it.

A leek planted in July has summer and autumn to gain diameter. In winter, it waits in the ground for you to come and get it. Every vegetable on this list must reach its size before November.

The eight vegetables sown in spring and harvested in winter

These take their time. They occupy the bed for long months, then are harvested through the winter. The dates are those of the app's catalogue for Belgium and northern France.

Celeriac is the most fragile of the group. The catalogue stops its harvest on 30 November. Lift it before the hard frosts and keep it cool, out of the frost.

The seven vegetables sown in summer for winter

These are sown when the vegetable garden is overflowing with courgettes. People often forget them.

Valdor spends the winter small, then forms a head at the end of winter. It gives the first salad of the year, from 20 February. The Belgian endive is not harvested in the garden. You lift its roots in autumn and force them away from light.

The cold tolerated, vegetable by vegetable

The "Cold tolerated" column comes from a table by Oregon State University (OSU), for well-established winter vegetables. OSU itself warns that these thresholds are indicative. They come from seed companies, market gardeners and its own observations, in western Oregon, in the United States.

Not all sources say the same thing. South Dakota State University places spinach and carrot among the vegetables that only tolerate a light frost, from -2 to 0 °C. OSU gives them -18 °C and -15 °C. The gap probably comes from the stage and the variety. An established winter spinach is not a spring spinach. These two tables do not let us settle it.

For the Brussels sprout, it is the reverse. OSU puts it at -4 to -1 °C, a low threshold for a vegetable harvested until March. South Dakota State University places it with the parsnip, among the vegetables harvested after several moderate frosts, from -4 to -2 °C.

At your place, look above all at the number of very cold nights. At Liège, it freezes below -10 °C on 1.2 days a year on average. Météo-France counts 0.6 days below -10 °C at Lille-Lesquin and 2.1 at Strasbourg-Entzheim. At Bordeaux-Mérignac, such nights do not appear in the 1991 to 2020 averages. According to these thresholds, leek, kale and parsnip get through an average winter outside without protection in all these towns. Winter lettuces and mustard hold down to -7 to -9 °C. Put a fleece over them on the coldest nights.

In South-west France, the south of France or the East

Further south, winter is shorter and growth restarts earlier. In the East, it freezes more. The catalogue stops the harvest of curly kale there in mid-November. The table gives three catalogue dates for each climate.

In the south of France, the spinach sowing window stretches to 24 November. For all regions, the sowing calendar for France gives the main dates of the year.

For next summer

Note two dates in your diary now. On 1 June, you plant the leeks. On 1 August, you sow the spinach and the winter lettuces. The guide What to sow in September gives the cut-off date for each late-summer sowing. The sowing calendar for Belgium covers the rest of the year.

The seeds whose window is open are in the To sow now collection. The app can also remind you of these dates for your own packets. Try it.

Photo: Ruth Hartnup, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0