How To Extend Your Growing Season In Louisiana and Mississippi

Most gardeners plant in the spring and sit back and watch it grow until fall. Then they reap their harvests and wait until spring returns. Growing your own vegetables in your Louisiana or Mississippi home is much better than buying them from the store, but in the winter we don’t usually have a choice. However, some dedicated gardeners keep planting well into winter and continue to have fresh vegetables year-round. How do they do it? Keep reading to find out.

Cold Frame Garden

If you are worried about sensitive crops as cold weather begins, building a cold frame is an excellent idea. Cold Frame gardening has been rediscovered as a gardening trend, but its idea goes back thousands of years. It is a great way to continue to grow vegetables throughout the winter naturally. 

A cold frame is as simple as a shallow rectangular box with no bottom and a cover made of glass, plastic, or fiberglass. The sides can be wood or bales of straw and should slope toward the south to capture the sun’s rays. Vegetables can be planted right into the ground or placed in pots. As the sun shines through the glass, it creates a greenhouse effect to naturally keep your plants warm. 

Indoor Herb Garden

Imagine cooking Christmas dinner or a holiday feast and reaching over to your herb planter and picking off fresh basil, mint, dill, parsley, or thyme. Well, you don’t have to imagine. Indoor herb gardens are all the rage. They are easy to grow and easy to care for. The best part is, they don’t take up too much space. Most people place their herb gardens in a window sill where it can get plenty of light. All you need to do is water them when the soil is dry and harvest them when they are ready to encourage new growth. 

Make a Hoop Tunnel

Hoop tunnels operate in a similar way to the cold frame garden. They protect your crops from the frost and cold, but retain the sun’s heat. Hoop tunnels are a little more complicated than a cold frame garden but you can cover your entire garden with it and produce much higher yields. 

You’ll need:

• ½ inch PVC piping
• 20-inch lengths of rebar
• Greenhouse plastic

Drive the rebar into the ground along the edge of your garden, placing one across from the other. Next, fit one end of the PVC pipe over the rebar and bed the other end and slide it over the opposite rebar, so it creates an arch. Repeat this process until all of your rebars have PVC pipe arches. Finally, drape a plastic sheet over your frame and secure the ends with rope or zip ties. Now you can enjoy vegetables even after it snows.

Start Seeds Indoors

We’ve already talked about extending your growing season into the winter, but what about the other way around. As we enter the new year, it’s time to start thinking about next year’s garden. Instead of trying to make this past season stretch longer, maybe you should get an early start on next year’s garden. Even without a cold frame, you can get a head-start on next year’s planting season by starting seeds indoors. You can start your plants early by using either a window sill or a grow light. Some people buy expensive nursery lights, but common fluorescent tubes will cost you much less and work just as well. 

Here in Louisiana and Mississippi, you can start your indoor seedlings about three months before the last frost date in your area. Keep in mind, growing from seed is tricky. Not every seed is going to sprout, and not every sprout will survive until planting, so be sure to plant more than you need. Continue starting seeds of different kinds until about a month before the last frost. When plants reach 3 to 4 inches, transplant seedlings into slightly larger pots and again when they reach 6 to 8 inches. 

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Most gardeners plant in the spring and sit back and watch it grow until fall. Then they reap their harvests and wait until spring returns. Growing your own vegetables in your Louisiana or Mississippi home is much better than buying them from the store, but in the winter we don’t usually have a choice. However, some dedicated gardeners keep planting well into winter and continue to have fresh vegetables year-round. How do they do it? Keep reading to find out.