Harvest More With Garden Bed Covers
Niki Jabbour, author of Growing Under Cover: Techniques for a More Productive, Weather-Resistant, Pest-Free Vegetable Garden, talks about using garden bed covers.
In a broadcast that originally aired live on The Food Garden Life Radio Show, we chat with vegetable gardening expert Niki Jabbour about using garden bed covers. She is the author of the new book, Growing Under Cover: Techniques for a More Productive, Weather-Resistant, Pest-Free Vegetable Garden.
Jabbour is a Halifax-based, award-winning author, host of The Weekend Gardener radio show, and one of the experts behind the gardening website Savvygardening.com.
She discusses the benefits of using garden bed covers, choosing covers suited to your situation, how to boost insulation of cold frames, tips for people thinking of a greenhouse, and greenhouse covering materials.
Why use Garden Bed Covers
Jabbour says that there are many reasons to use garden bed covers. “It’s about gardening smarter, not harder,” she says.
Reasons to use garden bed covers include:
Larger harvests
Better ability to control the growing environment
Year-round harvests
Including more “hyper-local” food on the menu
Reduced pest pressure
Creating conditions suited to exotic crops
Growing Under Cover, by Niki Jabbour
6 Ways to Boost Insulation of Cold Frames
In Growing Under Cover, she talks about six ways to boost the insulation of cold frames.
Line with foam
Add thermal collectors such as water-filled bottles
Surround with straw or boughs
Bury the cold frame in soil or mulch
Seal the cold frame with weatherstripping
Cover it on cold nights with carpet, old blankets, or some sort of insulating material
Types of Garden Bed Covers
Jabbour points out that not everyone has the space or money for a glass greenhouse. But there are many other options to provide cover for crops. These include:
Row covers
Cloches
Cold frames
Plastic-covered greenhouses
Mini hoop tunnels
Emma’s Tomato-Talk Segment
DO YOU EVER FEEL overwhelmed when trying to choose tomato varieties for your garden? In Emma’s tomato segment, she talks about choosing tomato varieties suited to your garden. She talks about:
Thinking about your own preferences
Days to maturity
Plant size
Disease resistance
Shipping costs
Biggs-on-Figs Segment
Melinda Myers talks about growing figs and artichokes in Wisconsin.
In the Biggs-on-Figs segment, we head to Wisconsin to chat with gardening expert Melinda Myers, who grows figs and artichokes in her USDA zone 4b garden.
A fig grower for over a decade, Myers says she also likes to include figs in her presentations because it gets people’s attention. “It always gets a second glace from anybody in the North or Midwest,” she says.
Find Myers online at melindamyers.com, where she is currently offering a number of free webinars.