Winter Gardening Learning from Failure
10/02/2025
The arrival of February has made us look towards summer and our plans for growing as much fruit and vegetables as possible. After all, one of our main aims is to work towards being as self-sufficient as possible on the homestead, and last year, although being our first year of gardening, was for the most part a success and the garden brought us so much joy. There really is nothing more satisfying than eating food that you have grown yourself.
We did plan to extend the growing season into Winter, assuming that with the slightly milder climate here in Portugal, it would be possible to grow certain vegetables during the Winter months. It seems that this Winter we got our timings a little wrong, so our winter broccoli, cabbage and potato crops were a bit of a failure. Just one or two plants managed to survive, and we know now that we planted way too late. In our defence, at the time I was travelling a lot with work and with some of the summer veg still thriving we didn’t make the extra space available soon enough. We planted in mid-October, whereas the beginning of September would have been prime time. We saw a friend’s garden just last week and it was bursting full of leafy greens, cabbage and fava beans. There are certain crops that just work well at certain times of the year and you can see why the locals stick to growing these.
Looking back to last Spring, a lot of our seeds were super slow to start and therefore our growing season was limited by the time we got the seeds to germinate and produce strong enough seedlings to transplant. This was most likely down to the morning frosts lasting right into March last year. We have discovered that weather wise, last Winter was one of the worst in a long time in Portugal, and we have already noted this year to be much more pleasant with less extreme weather and persistent storms. We are hoping that from last year’s failures and learnings, we will be in a better position to make adjustments to make this year’s vegetable garden our most productive yet. We know what grows well and what is a little more challenging, we know what we want to grow more of (basically everything), and we have plans to add more vegetable beds. After doing some online research in Portuguese, I felt like I struck gold when I came across a very helpful gardening table, showing when to sow, plant and harvest a big selection of vegetables specifically in our region of Portugal. We know now that growing in Portugal is a little bit different to growing in the likes of the UK and we need to adjust our schedule to allow for that.
So, it’s February and the morning and evening air is still a bit nippy, there is still a frost risk, but we know from the newly found growing schedule and from chatting to our friends, who are locals, that it’s time to plant some seeds already! In order to give our seeds a better start at this time of the year, we decided to make a cold frame. We drove past some public bins and came across some wooden frame windows that somebody had thrown away. They were in excellent condition, better than most of the old windows in our house! We brought them home and were able to construct a simple cold frame, to act as a mini greenhouse, out of completely reused materials. Eventually a big walk-in green house with lots of space to attempt to grow everything I can think of, is something I would absolutely love, but for now we think this should do the job. It is a simple rectangular box construction, set in a sunny spot in our garden bed area. The sides are made from 6 windows lay on their sides held together by little brackets, 2 windows long by 1 window wide. The lid is made out of an old metal window frame from our house and an old shower door that was actually laid on the roof of our kitchen to patch up a big hole when we first arrived. The cold frame has been constructed, with handy opening lids for watering, and we’ve went ahead and planted a range of tomato, pepper and aubergine seeds. Time to wait and let the magic happen! It feels so good to take a step forward towards this year’s vegetable growing efforts.
