Winter gardening. It kind of sounds like an oxy moron, especially if you live in a cold state like I do, but it is actually a thing and it can be pretty magical.

For many, many years, I just assumed that with our very frigid Wyoming prairie winters that anything out in the garden passed about October was 100% out of the question.

And so I wouldn't even go out there. I would pull the last of the tomatoes out, kind of put things away for the winter and then completely ignore my garden until spring finally rolled around.

However, in recent years, I've changed my tune on this quite a bit and I have found a whole lot of possibilities out in my garden 365 days a year.

In this episode, we're going to dive into some winter gardening strategies. We're going to talk about storage and how you can maximize your garden space all year long.

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Now on to our episode.

So yes, it is possible to grow food out in the winter garden.

Actually, let me rephrase that. For most of us, it's less about actively growing and more about maintaining things that have already grown.

Regardless, there's a lot of possibility out there. You can store things out in your garden.

You can actually reduce your preservation task load by strategically using your garden for storage. It's just a lot of things you can do.

So the first part of this episode, I want to talk a little bit about how you can keep vegetables in the garden.

The ones that you grew in the summer, they're already out there, maybe you don't have a root seller, you're limited on space, and how can you maximize your garden area to keep these vegetables fresh for many months to come.

So I've mentioned this a few times on social media over the last few months, and I always get a ton of questions about it.

Because I think a lot of people assume that every single thing must be removed from the garden, you know, before the first frost, and that's not necessarily the case.

Obviously, some things that tomatoes and the melons and the squash and the cucumbers, those are super susceptible to any sort of cold.

So if you are getting that news report that, oh my gosh, the frost is coming, the snow is coming, you're going to be out there racing to get everything in, but there's a number of crops that I will leave outside for quite a while longer, and this is how a lot of the old timers would do it.

They didn't have a lot of cold storage, so obviously a root seller is the most ideal situation.

And I think most of us homes that are minded folk would love a root seller, we're hoping to build one this year that's in the plans, we'll see what happens.

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