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The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers

What IS a Cool Season Crop?

The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers

Epic Gardening

Education, Home & Garden, How To, Leisure

4.81.6K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2019

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We use the phrase cool season crop a lot, but what does it actually mean? What crops can tolerate low temps, and for how long?

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:13.7

What's going on everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. Today we are going to discuss a piece of terminology that I use a lot on the podcast and we might as well just define exactly what it is. And that would be a cool season crop.

0:16.3

What does it actually mean for a plant to be a cool season crop?

0:20.6

Well, the most obvious example is just a crop that can survive and not only survive but thrive in cooler temperatures, something below 70 degrees.

0:32.0

A lot of cool season crops can also survive light frost. Some can

0:36.6

survive relatively heavy frost. Most of the time our cool season crops are in one of three categories.

0:45.0

They're either a cruciferous vegetable, your cabbage, your broccoli, your cauliflower,

0:48.9

your kale, it's an allium, your onions, your leaks, or your garlic's.

0:54.2

Or, finally, it is a salad green, your lettuce,

0:57.0

your arrugala, your chards, things like that.

1:00.5

Now, any of those are fantastic options, and I'm growing, in fact, all of those are fantastic options and I'm growing in fact all of those right now I just

1:05.8

put my garlic in the ground last week when we were talking about garlic here on the

1:09.8

podcast so when should you plant your cool season crops?

1:14.0

Well, if you're listening to the podcast at time of release, right about now is a good idea

1:18.0

unless you already have killing frost coming up.

1:21.0

But for perfect timing, you really want to be starting to think about your cool

1:24.6

season crops in late summer for mature crops in fall or the winter or very, very early spring

1:31.8

slash late winter so the crop gets to maturity before your true spring comes around.

1:37.6

The reason why is they need to come to maturity when the temperatures are cooler.

1:44.3

They're going to perform better that way,

1:46.8

they're going to taste better that way,

1:48.8

and they're just simply going to grow better that way. Now the final thing I will say is that a cool season crop

1:56.0

doesn't mean a freezing season crop and so the soil temperature still matters

...

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