The Winter Harvest Handbook

Tips from "The Winter Harvest Handbook" by Eliot Coleman
Condensed and abridged from: Permaculture Magazine
Some reasons for having a Winter Garden

• You may still have some veggies in your garden if you didn’t turn them to mulch in the fall, and that’s a few less things to buy at the grocery store. If you sowed seed in late autumn, then the seedlings could overwinter and start growing quickly in February, and be ready to fill in the gap between when spring seeds have been sown and are still not ready to eat. You would use early spring seeds for your late winter planting.
• Fresh food from your garden can give you much needed vitamins and minerals during the winter when they are harder to obtain.
• In the winter, fresh veggies are more expensive, so winter vegetables save you more money than Summer vegetables.
• You can feel content when you look at your garden, and it’s not sitting there empty and unused.

Get Protection for your Winter Garden
You can cover some plants with plastic tunnel, putting mulch inside to keep them warmer. Just take off the plastic and start watering again in the spring. If you mulch all around your garden, it will weatherproof it and will prevent mud from being splashed on your lettuces, give then frost protection, and make the plants grow faster. You can weigh the mulch down with bricks or stones.
Indoor Micro-Greens in Winter
It’s too dark to grow vegetables indoors, but you can grow sprouts and micro-greens. Put up some wide plastic shelves from Lowes or Home Depot in a south facing window, and sow seed trays of peas, cabbage, broccoli and kale. When they are two or three weeks sprouted, you can cut the micro-greens and use them in soups and salads. You can also grow salads sprouts in a salad sprouter or sieve. Garbanzo beans and lentils grow the fastest, and red cabbage adds color.
Winter Garden Vegetables
Perpetual spinach, chard, parsley, lettuce and radishes, chard, "long white icicle” radish (which can also be used cooked), "Freckles” lettuce under bubble wrap in a cold frame, they grow a lot of rocket, land cress and lambs lettuce in England that should work here for winter, too; carrots, celery sown after July, leeks, kale, curly leafed broccoli, purple broccoli (eat the leaves of the broccoli, leaving the plant stem), kale, artichoke, beets, potatoes.