1 Simple System for Year Round Gardening in Any Zone.!

The seasons are changing and the naysayers are out in full force. This video is not just for all of the naysayers, it's also for all of the gardeners out there that struggle with winters that are too cold, summers that are too hot, and shoulder seasons that are too wet and buggy. On this video, I'm going to share with you all the one simplified system that makes year-round gardening possible in every zone. Well, at least within reason. This will at least extend your growing season three months total. So don't let that pesky calendar tell you you can't garden. It is not the end. Over the course of this video, I will be featuring various covers, clamps, and other parts that you may be unfamiliar with. For your convenience, I placed direct links to all of them down in the video description if you want to get them for yourself. The only thing for sure you will have to go to the store for is any of the PVC electrical conduit, which you'll be able to get in the electrical aisle of any big box store. Every month, I release monthly planting guides that give you general guidance on what seeds to start at that month for the given time of the year. And now that at the time of filming this video, we are slowly heading into fall, I'm starting to get some negative feedback. Dos Gatos Design says, why didn't you tell us this three weeks ago so we could have started these seeds sooner? Well, I did on my last previous month's guide, but I promise you, there's still plenty of time for these seeds. Bobbitt Hill Homestead says, here in Zone 5 Upstate New York, there is no way we can start seeds for a fall garden now and expect them to do anything before we get the killing frost and the snow starts falling. We have a small greenhouse attached to our home where we grow things during the winter months, but everything in our outdoor gardens has to be harvested and stored by November 1. Ah, the key phrase in that statement is outdoor gardens. W.S. Bill says, you don't seem to understand how much the growing season changes just by several hundred miles. Here in Upstate New York, growing carrots or anything else in the fall is pointless. The sun goes down at 445 in Buffalo on December 21st. Nothing grows with so little daylight. Nothing grows, but it stores just fine. Now, a few things. Number one, I am not picking on anyone in this video. Once the spring rolls around and we reach March, I start getting the same messages from people that live in South Florida, Arizona, Vegas, and other places. They get really hot, really fast, saying the exact same thing. It's too late. I miss the boat and our hot summers. So this is not just for folks with cold winters. It's everybody that has a lengthy duration where plants suffer. Second, this video is made with one thing in mind, love and compassion. I'm reading your messages and I understand that you are not upset with me. You're frustrated because while you may have beautiful summers and early falls, I know the trauma of having long, dark, cold winters that seem to never end. It's okay in the beginning when we have the holidays to get us through, but after the holidays and we don't have anything to look forward to, it is utter torture. So I can tell in your voice, well your written voice, just how difficult the winters can be and I want to help. And third, I have lived in more places than you think and I'm quite experienced in a variety of climates. I've lived in both zones six, seven, and eight. And while I know some of you have more extreme climates than I have, I have learned over the course of my years that there are many ways that you can modify your climate and dramatically extend your growing season. Most of you will be able to grow 365 days a year and for those of you in the most extreme climates, we can unlock at least an additional three months. All of these frustrations and misconceptions can be tied back to one core problem and that is forcing the plants to grow out in the open. The overwhelming majority of things that we grow in our annual vegetable gardens are understory species, shrubs, and glorified weeds. All of these things hail from places with either very mild climates and oceanic places that don't get really hot, like brassicas that can grow out in the open, or they're tropical and subtropical understory vines and shrubs that are used to growing in frost-free areas and they have all the time in the world to grow under the dappled shade canopy and protection of the forest. So when we grow these things out in our open gardens, we generally struggle because it's too hot in the summer and it's too cold in the winter. But there is no reason why you ever should be growing any of your plants without some type of overhead protection and this is the key to unlocking a massive growing season. Let's start with the summer heat problem. Here where I live in Zone 8B, coastal North Carolina, our summers are outside of the growing season for most of what we grow because they are just too hot. When I grew all of my plants unprotected, my annual vegetable garden would be almost entirely killed off by the end of July. But now I've made it all the way through September and while the plants are a little bit beat up, they are still alive and now that the sun is getting weaker, they are starting to put on all new disease-free leaves. These tomatoes that used to be dead are putting on all new green growth free of disease and they're flowering. My peppers are still flowering and producing and looking fantastic. I am still getting cherry tomatoes and the more tropical peppers and eggplants are doing amazingly well. These things used to be goners by now, but now I have learned that there is never a reason to grow these plants out in full sun. They are just not adapted to it. So I emulate their native habitat and I install shade cloth overhead. Shade cloth is dirt cheap folks. There is no reason why we shouldn't be protecting our garden for the hottest 60 to 90 days of the summer with a little bit of shade. Your plants will thank you and it's so cheap it'll pay for itself in irrigation savings alone in no time, let alone the increased harvests. Virtually 100% of gardeners will benefit from using shade cloth during the summer at some point, if not the entire summer. So for the gardeners out there that are naysayers and say their summers are too hot to grow, well just install shade cloth. But what about gardeners that have winters that are too cold to grow in? Well, instead of using shade cloth like you would in the summer, you're going to use an agricultural fabric row cover and you're going to install that over your plants. I recommend an agricultural fabric of about 1.5 ounces per yard. That to me is the perfect thickness. It is enough that it lets in ample light transmission so the plants can still photosynthesize, but it's thick enough that it won't get torn up and shredded and it will keep those hard frosts and freezes off your plants. The reason why this works is when it comes to cold hardy crops, it's actually the hard frost formation that forms on the plants that causes the bulk of the damage. For example, things like your brassicas, your broccoli, your cabbage, your kale, your collards, your cold hardy root crops like radishes, beets, carrots, parsnips, and things like that. Anything that is frost and freeze hardy, well if you put a cover over them, some type of roof structure, that will block the formation of hard frost and freeze from forming on the vegetation of those plants, which will dramatically increase their cold hardiness. For example, something like romaine lettuce is going to get burnt to a crisp if it's left out in the open at like 28 degrees Fahrenheit, but with a row cover on top of it, that hard frost and freeze will not form on the vegetation. So even something fairly sensitive like a green romaine, they can take temperatures around 20 to 25 degrees if they don't have that hard frost formation form on them. So even if they freeze through, the fact that you don't get that frost formation dramatically increases their hardiness. This is even more effective when it comes to ultra cold hardy things like carrots, kale, and collards. These things can generally survive to about 10 to 15 degrees out in the open as is, but when you put a row cover on top of them, they can survive to zero degrees, maybe even a little less. That also goes for things like onions. I mean bulbing onions. When it comes to things like bunching onions and leeks, they can easily tolerate below zero temperatures, and don't even get me started with garlic. You have no idea just how incredible these row covers work. And I can prove it. Since I moved to Zone 8 coastal North Carolina nine years ago, I have gone through dozens of nights in the teens, including several nights in the single digits. Just last year, we got a big six inch snowstorm, and we got all the way down to 9.8 degrees Fahrenheit with an entire week of nights in the teens. And you know what? None of my crops suffered any significant damage. There may have been a little bit of browning here and there, but because I had everything covered with agricultural fabric, even though it snowed, even though everything froze over, even though we spent two entire days below freezing and everything had frozen solid through, once it warmed back up and things unthawed, everything was virtually unharmed. And what did? I just gave them a little bit of If you're enjoying this video from a real human being, would you please consider subscribing to the channel, hitting the like button, and leaving a comment. YouTube has been promoting shorts more heavily this year, and with all the AI slop hitting the program, it's been really hard for long format creators like myself to find new audiences, and interacting with a video like that goes miles to help spread it across the platform. If you could do those things and support my channel, I'd really appreciate it. Thank you so much. So, here is the simple unified system. Anything that you want to grow in, whether it's earthen rows, or whether it's raised garden beds, or whatever, you're going to install some type of hoop structure over the area that you are going to grow in. Then, in the wintertime, you are going to use a 1.5 ounce per yard agricultural fabric, which will allow light and rain and fresh air through, but block that hard frost formation. In the summer, you're going to use shade cloth in order to protect them from the extreme heat and UV index if you need it, and on the shoulder seasons, you can swap those covers out with insect netting if you wish. So, if the temperatures and the sun is nice in the spring and the fall, but you suffer from insect pest pressure, or you have things like birds, squirrel, deer, rabbits, and other things that want to eat your plants, we'll cover them with an insect netting during those seasons. So, there's really no reason why the overwhelming majority of the crops in your garden should be uncovered. The system couldn't be any easier. All you have to do is go to your local big box store like Lowe's, Home Depot, or what have you, and go to the electric aisle and get 1.5 inch PVC electrical conduit. You'll be able to make hoops over your raised garden beds using that conduit. It will freely bend. It's easy as pie. In fact, if you want a full detailed tutorial on how to build hoops like this, I'll link to the video both above and down in the video description. You can build them in 20 to 30 minutes with basic tools as a novice. It's so easy. You'll see I have these hoops everywhere because they're so easy and cheap to build. So, again, all you do is you get this half inch PVC conduit, and then you just get these conduit clamps. This is actually one inch EMT conduit that I purchased from the electrical aisle, and then I got conduit clamps, and I clamped them together, and that allows me to easily slide the hoops up and down. I can detach that entire structure if I want. It will pop right out. Then, once you have your three hoops clamped in place, well, in the middle, you'll drill and secure one of these conduit tees that you get from the plumbing aisle for like 75 cents a piece. You screw them into place to hold them, and then you have one single support that you can then either zip tie or electrical tape in place, and that gives you a sturdy enough hoop structure to put all of your various covers on. Then, all you'll do is you'll use half inch PVC snap clamps to snap the various covers in place. So, you'll get your shade cloth, your insect netting, or your agricultural fabric. You'll throw it over these hoops, and then you'll snap it into place, and that's all you have to do. But many of you have asked me, Anthony, I don't have wood-raised garden beds like you do, and I can't drill into them and secure conduit. How can I make hoops if I have metal-raised garden beds, concrete or stone-raised garden beds, or I garden directly in the earth and I have nothing to attach to? Well, I think you have two very good options. If all you need are basic row covers, you can go on Amazon and buy really inexpensive pre-made ones that give you a couple of feet of height. I'll drop a link in the video description to some options if they will suffice. But if you want something larger and more substantial like I have on my beds, this is what I recommend. Go to Lowe's, Home Depot, or whatever your local big box store is, and go over to where the lumber is and enter the concrete and masonry aisle. And you'll see these three-eighths inch rebar. They'll come in four-foot sections and two-foot sections. I generally recommend the four-foot section because you will get more support out of it. In the half-inch PVC conduit, that three-eighths inch rebar will thread into it almost perfectly like it was fitted to do so. A perfect fit. Then we will take the and we will pound it into the ground. I generally find the rebar works best with the 10-foot PVC conduits if you space the rebar every four feet for hoop support and then keep them about four feet apart to get a great bend on the conduit. If you need a narrower row, then you will probably have to cut the conduit to the length that you desire to get the hoop size that you want. PVC conduit will cut easily with any hacksaw. Then we're going to thread the PVC conduits right over the rebar and then it will naturally bend. And of course you're going to want to pull these down a lot further, but I'm just using this as a really cheap and easy demonstration that I'm putting together in real time in literally five minutes. So obviously if you have a little bit more time on your hands, you'll be able to do a much better job than this. But you'll see everything slips over easy as pie. Again, this is purely illustrative. I threw this whole thing together in two minutes and I specifically didn't pound the rebar down far enough because I want to be able to pop them out of the ground easily without a lot of effort. So this goes to show you how easy it is to set up hoops. You can do this in seconds. And if you want to be a little bit more professional, just pull a string line from end to end to line everything up nice and evenly. And you can see just like that, I basically have hoops that I could actually duck down and walk under. So you can see what kind of protection you can get. So I conveniently have a spare shade cloth lying around. So for the sake of this video, let's pretend we live in Phoenix, Arizona and it's March and it's starting to get really hot and we need to protect our tomatoes. Or we live in New Jersey and it's June and our romaine lettuce isn't ready yet and we need to stop it from bolting so we can get a harvest. Well, all you have to do is just take the shade cloth and pull it over the hoops. And again, if we're in Minnesota in the winter, pretend this is agricultural fabric. If we are in a buggy place in the fall, pretend it's insect netting, whatever. The point is we're just easily pulling it over the hoops we just made. And then we're going to take the PVC snap clamps and we're just going to snap it. And then I'm going to do the same thing to the other side. And now we have a shade house in five minutes. We just protected our tomatoes and peppers from getting scorched in the summer. We just protected our broccoli and our cabbage from bolting in a heat wave. We just allowed ourselves to transplant our lettuce and spinach out an entire month early in late summer or early fall when out in the open in the sun, we would have had to have waited. So we can get ourselves a big jumpstart in the season to start our seedlings if it's too hot. And we can extend the season if it starts getting too hot. So no matter what, this amazing little thing I put together in three minutes for the purposes of this video, well, this can be used for gardening 365 days a year. So circling back to Bobbitt Hill Homestead, you told me that you can't grow out in your open outdoor garden after November 1st, but you can still grow in the small greenhouse attached to your home. Well, my question to you is why is your outdoor garden unprotected? Why not protect your outdoor garden just like you are protecting your plants inside your greenhouse? And WS Bill, I noticed that you're also in upstate New York where Bobbitt Hill Homestead is. You say nothing will grow once the sun gets to a certain level. Well, how come they are able to grow inside their greenhouse in virtually the same location at the very least the same zone? And of course, the answer to that question is protection, protection, protection. When you keep those hard frosts and freezes from forming on your plants, you get incredible protection and you extend your growing season. But we need to dig deeper. Bobbitt Hill Homestead said that they had a greenhouse attached to their house and that gives a tremendous microclimate advantage because you are running the heat in your house and your house is baking in the sun all day and it absorbs that heat from the sun and radiates it out at night. So you're heating the inside of the house and the house is heating up due to the sun exposure itself. So all night long, it's radiating warmth inside that greenhouse, giving several degrees of protection. That's why I'm growing a satsuma tree, an avocado tree, and a lemon tree successfully here in Zone 8, North Carolina, where they shouldn't grow. One of the big microclimate advantages I have is the radiative warmth of my house. So do what I did here. Put a few raised garden beds right up against one of the walls of your house. I cleared out the landscaping here so I could grow food here up against the house because of the warmth of the microclimate. So while it frosts in my yard in early November, it won't frost up against the house until almost a month later. So you can extend your growing season just due to that microclimate advantage. And of course, you can install hoops over here and you can create your own little greenhouse up against your house for pennies. But W.S. Bill still has a point. Climates at high latitudes suffer from a phenomenon coined Persephone Days. That is when the total day length from sunrise to sunset falls below 10 hours a day and the UV index becomes so small that plants just can't photosynthesize well and they appear to stall. So even if you can keep them relatively warm and protected from the cold, they won't really grow well. But that is not a bad thing. That can be a dramatic advantage when you're fall gardening, as long as you plan accordingly. Persephone Days are a nightmare to the novice gardener, but they are a godsend to the experienced gardener that knows how to exploit them to their gain. One of the biggest problems that we have with our summer gardens is we can't pick the harvests enough. We go from no food at all to a sudden deluge and then we don't know what to do with it all and it goes to waste. Well, you can use Persephone Days to your advantage because the weak UV can hold your plants in stasis, but it takes preparation. So what you want to do generally is start your plants a little bit early underneath shade cloth to give them a jump start of about three to four weeks early versus what your climate can normally sustain if you have issues with growth in your fall garden. Then if you can get the plants trucking and chugging along and you can get them to about maturity when the days really get low in, you know, the end of November when it's not super cold, but they crawl along, you can actually use the outdoor environment to your advantage to hold them in stasis. Mature brassicas and root crops can survive all the way down to about zero to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. So if you can achieve that maturity level at some point in November, chances are you can keep them holding in your garden for about 30 to 45 days and use the outdoors as a giant refrigerator. So what will happen is they'll be mature, ready for harvest, but they can't grow. So you'll pull those thick agricultural blankets over them, a really thick row cover, and then they're not really going to do anything. So all of that stuff that's sitting in your garden, well, you now have six weeks to go at your leisure and harvest what you need, you know, roughly give and take. The point is that you don't have to go out there and harvest everything all at once. Like you have to do with your tomatoes and cucumbers before they rot on the vines and attract pests. You'll have a nice long season of stasis where you can go out and take what you need. These are the concepts that I really want to teach you on my channel. You have to understand that everything that is a con can also be a pro and everything that is a pro can also be a con. Persephone days on their face are no good because that means our plants won't grow. But if you prepare adequately and you get them to the point of almost maturity, you can use those Persephone days when the UV index is weak, but it's not super cold yet to hold your plants in stasis and extend that harvest. And these techniques can also give you a big jumpstart in the spring as well. So when you want to start your brassicas in the cool season, if you start them underneath hoops with an agricultural fabric, you can plant them out an entire three or four weeks early because you're giving them protection so you can get a big jumpstart. And then you can plant a second wave of brassicas or lettuce or carrots or other things that may suffer in the heat and extend that second wave by using shade cloth to protect them from bolting or bittering. There are so many different things you can do and every single crop that you grow can be extended four to six weeks if you use these techniques. Now look, this isn't magic. We have to work within the limitations of the plant. If your covers freeze through, you're not going to be able to plant tomato plants and pepper plants. Frost sensitive plants are not going to be extended significantly into the fall and winter, but we can greatly extend our cold hardy crops that can tolerate a freeze by keeping the frost off of them. Similarly, you can keep a lower stress tomato garden and increase the production longer into the season. But if you live in a place like Phoenix or Las Vegas, where it's just unlivable temperatures in the heart of the summer, at some point your tomatoes are probably going to die on you. But the point isn't to get them in extreme climates through the entire summer. It's to extend the harvest and get another six weeks of production because more is more. And you can also slow bolting on your cool season crops. There's no world where I can grow broccoli in July here on the southeastern coast of North Carolina. But if I mistime things and I plant my broccoli late in the spring, I can give it another two or three weeks of a push before it bolts by using shade cloth to my advantage. To make this system work, you need two things, knowledge and planning. I just gave you the knowledge you need and I can hear the gears in your head turning as you're absorbing this information. But you still need to plan and those that fail to plan, plan to fail. If you keep telling yourself that it's over, you will make yourself correct and it will be over. But if you don't want it to end and you start planning early enough in the process, it doesn't have to end. The overwhelming majority of you using these techniques can easily get things started six weeks early in the spring and extend things out six weeks later in the fall. And for many of you, there's only about three months throughout the year that you can't really garden in as is. So the vast majority of land mass in the United States can unlock a 365 day a year growing season, growing something if you use these techniques. And for those of you that are outside of that range in really extreme climates, well, you'll be able to dramatically add the amount of food that you grow every single year with little effort. So everybody, I sure hope you found this video helpful and you learned something. I used to struggle with seasonal depression so badly. It's one of the main reasons why I moved from the Northeast. I wanted longer winter days, but truth being, the thing that really cured my seasonal affective disorder was being out in the garden 365 days a year. And even where I used to live in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as cold as zone six, implementing these techniques, I could have done it there. That being said, I still like being a little bit further south, but I digress. The point I'm trying to make in all of this is no matter where you are, you can increase the amount of food that you are growing and the amount of time that you are outside enjoying life. And I want that for all of you. I'm not picking on anybody in this video. I say this with the greatest amount of love because I know how hard it is to suffer from the terrible heat in the summer and the dreary, cold, gray skies of the winter. And I want the best for all of you. I hope you got a lot out of this video and that is the key takeaway. So everybody, I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please make sure to hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, and please ring the notification bell so you're notified when I release more videos like these. I placed direct links to all of the products I featured down in the video description. For everything else I use in my yard and garden in real life, that's linked in my Amazon storefront in the video description. And while you're down there, check out my website, themillennialgardener.com for all things gardening and custom home design merch. If you want to support my channel, thank you all so much for watching. I hope to see all of you again on the next video. And now I need to take this down before it gets too dark. Today is probably the first day in a month and a half that it is not deathly humid. It's hot, but it's not like horrible out. And we actually have some nice, decent cloud cover for a change where it is not raining. So we have slightly more agreeable temperatures and some sun protection. And Dale is just having a ball. He's been a little bit sluggish on his walks recently because it's been so unbearably hot and humid. But now we're really enjoying this walk and he's pulling with a lot more energy. So we're going to hang out around the pond, check out all of the bird life, and we're just going to enjoy this slightly cooler afternoon and really look forward to fall weather. That's just the best. Right, Dale? Dale don't care. He's on a mission.