- 2 days ago
A greenhouse does not need electricity to stay useful in winter — it needs the right crops, the right timing, and a smart layer of protection. This DIY infrared heater discussion quickly becomes a deeper guide to winter greenhouse growing, explaining why plants grow by light, not warmth, and why the cold season is really about preserving harvests alive on their roots.
The transcript breaks down the so-called dark gap of winter, when short days stop most growth, and shows how to plant in late summer or early fall so crops reach size before the light fades. It covers cold-hardy greens like mâche, winter spinach, kale, tatsoi, mustard, pak choi, claytonia, winter lettuce, plus root crops such as carrots, leeks, beets, and turnips. It also explains winter watering, ventilation on sunny days, and the value of double covering with row cover, cold frames, or low tunnels.
For gardeners searching for greenhouse heating ideas, cold frame gardening, winter vegetable gardening, or low-energy ways to extend the season, this is practical homestead advice rooted in real winter growing conditions. It is especially useful for anyone comparing DIY greenhouse heat, frost protection, and no-electricity gardening methods.
SEO keywords: DIY greenhouse heater, greenhouse heating without electricity, winter greenhouse gardening, cold frame vegetables, cold hardy crops, season extension, winter harvest, homestead gardening, low tunnel, greenhouse ventilation, and winter vegetable growing.
The transcript breaks down the so-called dark gap of winter, when short days stop most growth, and shows how to plant in late summer or early fall so crops reach size before the light fades. It covers cold-hardy greens like mâche, winter spinach, kale, tatsoi, mustard, pak choi, claytonia, winter lettuce, plus root crops such as carrots, leeks, beets, and turnips. It also explains winter watering, ventilation on sunny days, and the value of double covering with row cover, cold frames, or low tunnels.
For gardeners searching for greenhouse heating ideas, cold frame gardening, winter vegetable gardening, or low-energy ways to extend the season, this is practical homestead advice rooted in real winter growing conditions. It is especially useful for anyone comparing DIY greenhouse heat, frost protection, and no-electricity gardening methods.
SEO keywords: DIY greenhouse heater, greenhouse heating without electricity, winter greenhouse gardening, cold frame vegetables, cold hardy crops, season extension, winter harvest, homestead gardening, low tunnel, greenhouse ventilation, and winter vegetable growing.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Here's a thing almost nobody will tell you straight, and it costs folk a whole winter's
00:05food every single year because they learn it too late. A greenhouse in the dead of winter
00:11is not a place where crops grow. It is a place where crops keep. And the man who does not
00:18know
00:18the difference will stand in his cold glass house in January staring at a tray of spinach
00:24that has sat the exact same size for six weeks, and he will think his greenhouse has failed him.
00:32It has not failed him. He has asked it to do the one thing no greenhouse on earth can do
00:39in the
00:39deep of the year. He asked it to grow his food in the dark, and there is not light enough
00:45in a
00:46winter to grow anything, not under the finest glass ever built. I am going to show you tonight
00:53how to eat fresh green things out of your own greenhouse all through the winter, in the teeth
00:59of the frost, with little heat or none at all. But to do it, you must first understand the one
01:05law
01:06that rules the whole business, the law the seed catalogs and the garden stores will never put
01:12on the packet, because once you know it, you stop buying so much from them. I gathered the whole of
01:19it into a book at EliasYoder.com. The book is the long version. If you want it, it is there.
01:26I will
01:27not mention it again. So here is the law. A plant does not grow on warmth. A plant grows on
01:35light.
01:36You may keep a greenhouse warm as a kitchen, and it will not matter, for when the days grow short
01:42enough, when the sun climbs too low and the daylight falls under about ten hours from dawn to dusk,
01:49a green plant very nearly stops growing altogether. It does not die, it simply holds. It sits and waits,
01:59scarcely bigger today than it was a week ago, biding its time until the light comes back.
02:05The old people did not have a fine name for it, but they knew it in their bones, for they
02:10watched it
02:11happen every year of their lives. From about the back end of November through to the middle of January
02:17in most of the northern country, the sun is simply too weak and too low to feed a plant enough
02:24to make
02:24it grow. I call it the dark hollow of the year. For near two months, the light is gone, and
02:31nothing you
02:32do brings it back. Now once you grasp that, the whole of winter growing turns right side up,
02:38and it becomes simple. You do not try to grow your food in the dark hollow. You grow it in
02:45the autumn,
02:45in the good light, while there is still growing left in the days, and you time it so your crops
02:51come to full size just as the dark hollow begins. And then, through all the cold, dark weeks,
02:58you are not growing them. You are storing them. Alive. On the root, in the ground, under glass.
03:06The greenhouse in winter is not a field. It is a living root cellar, and your supper is kept fresh
03:13out there on its own roots far better than it would keep in any cellar bin. So, the great mistake,
03:21the one that costs people the whole season, is sowing too late. They wait for the frost to come,
03:27then run out and sow their winter greens, and the seedlings come up tiny just as the light fails,
03:33and there they sit, thumbnail-sized, all winter, never growing a leaf worth eating.
03:40You must sow early, while the autumn sun still has strength. The plain rule I follow is this.
03:47Whatever the seed packet says a crop needs to come to size, add near half as long again on top
03:53of it
03:53for the fading autumn light, and count your days back from the middle of autumn. For most northern
04:00gardeners, that means your winter greens want sowing from late summer into the first part of autumn,
04:05no later. Get them up and near their full size before the dark hollow closes in, and they will
04:12hold for you clear through to spring. Now, let me give you the crops, for not every plant will take
04:18this.
04:19You want the hardy ones, the tough old cold lovers that laugh at a frost, and I will name them
04:25for you.
04:25First and best is a little green most folk have never heard of, called mosh, or corn salad, or lamb's
04:34lettuce. This is the hardiest salad green there is, bar none. It will sit under glass through a hard
04:41freeze, thaw out, and still be sweet and tender on your plate. The old market gardeners of Europe lived on
04:50it through the winter, cutting little rosettes of it off the cold ground when nothing else green remained.
04:57Sow it thick, for the plants are small, and cut the whole little rosette at the base when you harvest.
05:05If you grow one thing in your winter house, grow this.
05:12Next is spinach, and winter spinach is a different creature from the summer kind.
05:17The cold does something wonderful to it. A spinach leaf that has taken a few frosts turns sweeter,
05:26not bitter, for the plant floods itself with its own sugars to keep from freezing, the same as sap
05:33rising sweet in a maple. Winter-sown spinach undercover will feed you leaf by leaf all the cold months,
05:43and it only gets sweeter as the weather hardens. Pick the outer leaves and leave the little heart of
05:50the plant be, and it will keep throwing you new leaves from the center whenever a mild spell gives it
05:57a bit
05:58of growing. Never strip a plant bare in winter, for it has no strength to spare to recover fast.
06:07Then there is kale, the great survivor, and like the spinach, it sweetens in the cold.
06:15A kale plant that has stood through frost after frost is milder and sweeter than any kale you buy in
06:24the
06:24warm season. Grow the hardy old curly kinds, the ones bred for standing the cold. They will stand half
06:33buried in snow and come through green, and you pick the lower leaves as you need them and let the
06:40plant
06:40keep rising from its top. One row of good kale will feed a family a long while.
06:49After that, the Asian greens, the tatsoi and the mustards and the pak choi. These grow quick in
06:58the autumn and take cold far better than folk expect, and they give you something with a bit
07:03of bite to it when you are weary of plain lettuce. Tatsoi, in particular, forms a flat green rosette
07:12pressed near to the ground that shrugs off the cold and keeps right on offering its dark spoon-shaped
07:20leaves. They come to size quick, so they are a fine one to sow if you got a late start
07:27and need
07:28something fast before the dark closes in. There is a green called claytonia that some call winter
07:36purslane or miner's lettuce, and it is another one that near nothing kills. It came up through
07:45many a hard winter for the old folk and asked almost nothing in return. It seeds itself about
07:53freely, too, so once you have it in your winter house, it tends to come back on its own year
07:59after
07:59year, a free crop that plants itself, and the whole little plant is good eating, leaf and stem and small
08:09white flower alike. And there is a hardy winter lettuce, not your summer kind, which would turn
08:16to mush at the first freeze, but the tough old upright winter sorts bred to stand the cold. Grow those
08:25and you have salad in January. Now hear me plain on one thing, so you are not let down. Your
08:36winter
08:36harvest comes slow and steady, a cut here and a handful there, not the great flush of summer. You are
08:46drawing down a larder, not reaping a field. Take a little from many plants, rather than stripping a few,
08:55and your winter house will feed you a fresh bowl of greens two or three times a week, right through
09:02the
09:03hungry months, which is a wonder worth having when the rest of the world is eating from tins and plastic
09:10bags.
09:12And do not forget the roots. Carrots left in the ground under a greenhouse, well mulched, turn to candy in
09:21the
09:21cold, for the very same reason the spinach sweetens. A winter carrot pulled sweet from half-frozen ground
09:30is one of the great quiet joys of this life. Leeks will stand in the cold ground like soldiers
09:39all winter and be dug as you want them. Beets and the hardy turnips will keep the same way,
09:47left right where they grew. Mulch the roots deep with straw or leaves before the ground locks up hard,
09:56so you can still work a fork in and lift them through the winter. For a carrot you cannot dig
10:03out of frozen ground does you no good. The ground itself is your cellar, and the cold is the very
10:10thing
10:11that makes the keeping sweet. Now I must warn you of the second mistake, near as common as sowing too
10:19late, and that is drowning your plants in the cold. In the summer a plant drinks hard, for it is
10:27growing
10:28hard. In the dark hollow it is barely growing, so it barely drinks, and the cold wet soil does not
10:36dry
10:36out the way warm soil does. Pour water on it as though it were July, and you will rot the
10:44roots and
10:44bring a gray fuzzy mold creeping over the leaves in that still, damp, shut-up air. So water sparingly
10:54in winter, only when the soil has gone dry to the touch, and water in the morning, never the evening,
11:01so the leaves dry before the cold night settles. And there is a thing folk never expect, which is
11:10that your winter greenhouse can cook your plants even in January. Let the sun come out bright on a
11:18cold clear day, on all that glass shut up tight, and the heat builds fast inside until it bakes the
11:26very greens you are trying to save. So on a sunny day you crack a vent or ease a door,
11:34just a little,
11:35to let that hot wet air trade out for fresh, and you close it up again before the cold of
11:42evening.
11:43A greenhouse wants tending in winter, not just leaving be. It is a small daily habit, a minute
11:52morning and evening, and it is the difference between greens that thrive and greens that rot or roast.
12:01Now here is the trick that doubles everything, and it is the simplest thing in the world.
12:07One layer of cover is good, two is far better. Over your greenhouse, which is your first layer,
12:15you lay a second cover right down close over the plants themselves. A sheet of row-cover cloth draped
12:24over little hoops, a low tunnel inside the greenhouse, even an old storm window laid over a bed.
12:33That little pocket of still air trapped between the two covers is worth more than any heater,
12:40for it holds the warmth the ground gives up at night and holds off the killing frost.
12:47The old market gardeners knew this. They would throw straw mats and old sashes over their cold
12:55frames at nightfall and lift them in the morning, two layers between the tender greens and the cruel sky.
13:03Two covers and no fire at all will carry hardy greens through cold that would kill them bare.
13:12My grandmother did a thing I remember to this day. She kept a cold frame, a simple box with an
13:20old
13:20window for a lid, up against the south wall of the summer kitchen where the stones held the day's
13:27warmth. All through the winter, when the garden was dead and buried,
13:33she would go out of a morning, lift that frosted glass, and cut a mess of green things for the
13:40table,
13:40while the snow lay deep on everything else. I asked her once how she had greens when every other
13:48garden for miles was bare. She lowered the glass gentle, and she said,
13:54I did not grow them in the winter, child. I grew them in the fall. The winter only keeps them.
14:03I was a boy, and I did not understand her. I have spent my life learning she was exactly right,
14:10and that single sentence is the whole of this video.
14:16So let me say plainly, who gains by you not knowing this? The grocer gains, who sells you a
14:24plastic bag of spinach flown in from half a world away in the dead of your winter, limp and dear
14:32and
14:32tasteless. The seed company gains a little, selling you fresh seed every spring because you never learned
14:41to carry a crop through. It is not that anyone sat in a room and schemed to make you forget
14:48that a
14:49cold frame feeds a family through the snow. It is worse and simpler than that. A thing you must buy
14:57again every week gets remembered, and a thing you grow once in the autumn and eat all winter gets
15:06forgotten. No one coordinated it. It just rolled on by itself, winter upon winter, until folk came to
15:16believe fresh food in January must come from a store. Now tell me this in the comments. What is the
15:25coldest
15:26it gets where you are on a hard winter night, your lowest temperature, for that decides which of these
15:34you can carry through bare and which will want that second cover. And tell me as well whether you have
15:41a greenhouse, a cold frame, or only a sunny window, for there is a winter green here to suit every
15:49one
15:49of them. Next time I will show you how to build the cold frame itself, that simple glass-topped box
15:57my
15:57grandmother kept against the wall, so that even those of you with no greenhouse at all can eat green
16:04things out of the snow. But for now remember the one law above all the rest. You do not grow
16:13your winter
16:13food in the winter. You grow it in the fall, and you let the cold keep it for you. The
16:21people who built
16:22this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it.