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Brrr, garden bounty

Imagine: Salads that come in from the cold frame. Inside and out, the growing goes on.

Jennifer Ryan is standing by a little greenhouse located in backside of her Roxborough row house. (Akira Suwa / Staff Photographer )
Jennifer Ryan is standing by a little greenhouse located in backside of her Roxborough row house. (Akira Suwa / Staff Photographer )Read more

Jennifer Ryan once grew lettuce in a milk crate on her Brooklyn fire escape, so it's no wonder she's having a ball with a real backyard in Roxborough.

Actually, it's a real rowhouse yard, about 10 feet by 10 feet, with neighbors all round. The living is close on Ripka Street.

But it was a neighbor who inadvertently got Ryan thinking about growing arugula and other salad greens outside her new home in winter. The neighbor was throwing away some old wood-frame windows, a treasure no enterprising urban gardener would think of kicking to the curb.

Like a bird building a nest, Ryan, an artist, sculptor, art therapist, beekeeper, and community gardener, used the windows to build a funky lean-to greenhouse against the back wall of her kitchen. She lined it with Bubble Wrap for insulation.

"I always want to sit in there," she says.

In deep cold, Ryan covers her greenhouse with a blanket or puts a bucket of used dishwater, still hot, inside. So far, it's working.

The other day it was 35 degrees outside and 53 degrees inside the makeshift lean-to, just right for growing arugula and other cool-season crops that hate the heat but don't mind a light frost.

There are heat-tolerant lettuce blends, like 'Heatwave,' but most lettuces bolt, or go to seed, in hot weather, usually just as summer's most blessed gift, the homegrown tomato, is cranking up. Always a disappointment, but not as bad as going all winter without baby romaine or crumpled cress.

Which may explain the many products out there for growing seasonal greens and the lengths to which gardeners go to do so.

Garden-supply companies offer grow lights and all manner of tiered systems to start seeds indoors, but Delaware County master gardener Darlene Delany suggests you'll get the same results with inexpensive shop lights or plain fluorescent tubes hung low from a shelf.

"In a small space, you get very creative," she says.

For outside winter planting, you can buy small, covered growing racks for about $100 or mini-greenhouses that are 5 feet tall and wide for less than $200. As with anything, there are plenty of ways to spend far more.

Nothing beats the simple cold frame, an ages-old design comprising a box made of wood and an old storm window or clear plastic top that keeps the inside toasty. The lid can be propped open on warm winter days to make sure lettuces and other cool crops, such as spinach, Swiss chard, Chinese cabbage, and kale, can, literally, vent.

"Venting is the thing. The frames do get hot," says Noah Gress, a Chester County farmer who grows for Pete's Produce Farm in Westtown and supplies Swarthmore College with salad mix and potatoes.

Gress suggests that winter gardeners in the city take advantage of the urban "heat-island effect" their geography affords. City buildings and paved surfaces retain heat during the day and cool down much more slowly at night, meaning Philadelphia can be as much as 10 degrees warmer in all seasons, day or night, than its suburbs and rural areas, according to meteorologist Greg Heavener, of the National Weather Service in Mount Holly.

"If you take the same time frame overnight, eight hours, the rural areas might cool one degree every hour, while in the city, it's maybe one-quarter of a degree," says Heavener, who notes that when it's 56 degrees in Philadelphia, it's 53 at his home in Wyncote.

So get smart, city gardeners. Let your cold frames snuggle up to those winter-warm buildings. "With the protection your architecture offers, you can sustain a little all-season garden," says Gress.

Heidi Foster, a retired teacher in Chestnut Hill, went indoors for her winter garden. She bought two self-watering, self-fertilizing, EarthBox container-gardens for about $50 each. She filled them with seed-starting mix, added arugula and lettuce seeds, and set the boxes on a table in her kitchen.

The kitchen is chilly, but it's very sunny with a southern exposure and a lot of glass, just the kind of environment lettuces love.

"I don't have a cold frame so these boxes are incredible to me," says Foster, who does her harvesting with scissors. "You can't really screw up."

Sometimes, weather does it for you, as Kathi Misunas, a retired investigator for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, discovered a few weeks ago.

Misunas, who put up more than 500 pounds of tomatoes last year, usually grows a truckload of lettuce outside all winter long in a most unusual container.

You could guess forever and not figure out what it is, so here's the deal: Misunas grows lettuce in an old clawfoot bathtub raised up on cinder blocks (yesss!) in the backyard of her three-acre property in Springfield Township, Burlington County.

She puts rocks in the bottom for drainage, fills the tub with potting soil (three inches from the top), sows loose-leaf lettuce seeds, and covers it all with a roll of clear plastic that lets sunlight in and keeps everything warm.

When the seeds germinate, "it looks like a lawn full of lettuce in there," Misunas says. Except this year, when a cold snap wiped out the entire crop. She laughs.

"It's all an experiment. I can tell you exactly how to do it and what works for me, and it won't work at your site," Misunas says, vowing to put snow peas in the back of the tub on Feb. 15, and more gourmet lettuce in front, as she waits for tomato madness.

"Not like it's rocket science," she adds.

Starting seeds? Start simple

Darlene Delany and Ed Lyons, Delaware County master gardeners, offer the perfect setup: They start their seedlings inside a small, heated greenhouse at Taylor Memorial Arboretum in Wallingford.

It's free. It's warm. It's fun.

Once a retreat for Joshua C. Taylor and his wife Anne, both civic leaders in Chester, this arboretum is one of the region's lesser-known. Comprising 30 wooded acres along Ridley Creek, it's intended to be "a sanctuary for plants and animals."

Which it certainly is. But inside the greenhouse Delany, Lyons, and other volunteers are busy preparing to sow the first of 5,000 seedlings that they will provide this year for a community garden near Sixth and Morton Streets in Chester.

First up: lettuce, spinach, collards, cabbage, and broccoli, which will spend four to six weeks in the greenhouse before being transplanted to a cold frame down at the garden. They'll be planted in early April.

In March, the gardeners start warm-season plants in the greenhouse - tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants, as well as marigolds, zinnias, petunias, and impatiens - to be planted in the ground in mid-May.

On and on it goes, but these lucky gardeners agree, it's not necessary to have a greenhouse. In fact, "it's best to start simple," says Lyons, a retired Texaco ship's master from Brookhaven.

Make a cold frame outside or start your seeds inside with a seed-starting mix, in a plastic six-pack made for plants, not beer. Make drainage holes in the bottom. Cover with plastic to seal in moisture, then put under grow lights or in a warm, bright spot facing south. (Remember: Windowsills are colder than you think.)

Once the seeds pop, remove the plastic and water with restraint. But do water, says arboretum manager Tom Kirk, who's growing lettuces and spinach in the Taylor greenhouse, too.

"People often start something, then go away for the weekend," he says. "You have to water just like you would your containers in summer. They dry out frequently."

Some other pointers:

Read the seed packet, says Delany, a retired hospital administrative assistant from Middletown. You'd be amazed at how much information is there, and how many people ignore it.

Expect disasters. "I still have them," says Lyons. "You learn by what you do wrong."

Then, if your black-seeded Simpson wilts, if your oak leaf self-immolates, if your cold frame freezes over, there's this consolation: You can plant lettuce seeds outside, free of frame, cover or worry, starting April 1.

Read garden writer Virginia A. Smith's blog at www.philly.com/philly/blogs/gardeningEndText