The 12 Best Hardy Vegetables for Late-Season Harvests
The start of cold weather can catch many gardeners off guard. Just as your harvests are starting to ramp up for the season, an early frost kills your tomato plants and leaves you with little to show for your efforts.
It’s possible to skip this disappointment by growing cold-tolerant plants instead. By focusing your garden around hardy vegetables, you’ll manage to bring in harvests long after the heat-loving varieties have given up the ghost.
Many cold-tolerant plants require long growing seasons and need to be planted long before the weather turns chilly. This ensures they have plenty of time to get established in pleasant conditions and helps them continue producing once things get cold.
Not sure what to grow? Here are twelve cold-hardy plants to grow at home. Each will help you extend your growing season and ensure you always have something fresh to eat, even when the ground is covered in snow.
Lettuce (Lactuca sativa var. ramosa) is a leafy green vegetable that is often cultivated worldwide for commercial and personal gardens. The whole plant can be used for salads, soups, wraps, or sandwiches. Human cultivation of Lettuce dates back to the 5th century in China, and there are now many different cultivars grown globally.
When you look at a wild Cabbage plant, you may be surprised by how many edible vegetables were derived from it. Native peoples selectively cultivated the wild Cabbage over centuries to produce broccoli, cauliflower, kale, kohlrabi, and more. The wild form of the plant is also edible.
The Beets (genus Beta) are a small group of flowering plants in the amaranth family. The species’ most recognizable member, by far, is the Cultivated Beet (B. vulgaris), which is grown for food. Beets are hardy and very cold tolerant, allowing them to be grown at high latitudes or altitudes, where other crops often fail. They are primarily grown to produce sugar, but they’re also a popular vegetable in their own right (both the roots and greens are edible and nutritious).
Spinach (Spinacia oleracea) is an edible plant species that is often considered a ‘superfood’ due to its high content of vitamins, folate, fiber, iron, magnesium, and other nutrients. Spinach is grown in gardens around the world and provides an important food source.
The name Onions can be applied to many plants including edible onions, garlic, leeks, and more. Popular as garden plants and also grown commercially, the flowers grow on tall stalks and both leaves and bulbs are usually edible. Onions offer both beauty to the garden and protection from critters; the leaves emit a garlic-like or onion-like fragrance that repels rodents and other pests.
Although the part of Parsnips (Pastinaca) that grows under the ground is edible, the stem and leafy parts that you see growing above ground are toxic. A genus of flowering plants, the most well known is Pastinaca sativa, the common parsnip, which is cultivated as a vegetable root crop. Some species of Parsnips have escaped cultivation and have become a weed of disturbed areas.
Corn salad (Valerianella locusta) is a small annual that grows to 6 to 12 inches in height. It grows on bare ground with rocky soils or coastal dunes producing small clusters of white flowers that bloom from spring to summer. Sow in summer to produce deliciously-edible salad greens throughout winter.
One of the oldest cultivated plants in Europe and Asia, the Turnip is one of those vegetables that you can consume in its entirety. The fleshy roots and greens can be typically cooked or eaten raw, like in a salad. It also has many varieties, such as the rounded turnip whose root’s bottom is half white and half purple.
Radish (Raphanus sativus) is a plant species that represents a food staple in many cultures around the world. The Radish has a wide range of variations, including variants that grow in the spring, summer and winter. The root is generally eaten raw and can be used in salads or as a garnish.
The Spring beauty (Claytonia) are a group of diminutive, flowering plants. A few species of Spring beauty are grown ornamentally, although they are not widely cultivated as their flowers tend to be very small and not particularly showy. They will most commonly be encountered as wildflowers or garden weeds. The most famous species in the genus is referred to as “Miner’s lettuce” and is considered a wonderful salad green, consumed for centuries by indigenous Americans and European settlers in mining camps.
Carrot (Daucus carota subsp. sativus) is the domestic version of its wild relative. This ubiquitous vegetable is closely related to parsley, fennel, and dill. The orange root can be eaten cooked or raw. The Carrot is self-fertile and is pollinated by flies and beetles, who use its flowers as a food source.
Brussels sprouts (Brassica oleracea var. gemmifera) are grown in cool-weather vegetable gardens to harvest their miniature cabbage-like buds. It’s thought the common name comes from this vegetable’s popularity in Brussels, Belgium, which dates back at least to the 1300s.