The first frost is one of the great seasonal turning points on UK farms. It can appear suddenly overnight and greets farmers in the morning as a beautiful silver shimmer across the fields. With the change, farmers are shifting their focus from watering and weeding to protecting crops from the harsh cold.
Frost spells the end for high water content crops, as ice crystals burst their delicate cells, winter salads and less-hardy roots like radishes and beetroots get harvested or covered in a layer of fleece or straw for protection.
Calabrese broccoli doesn’t like the cold snap either, but its hardier relatives, purple sprouting and cauliflower, will keep us going. Meanwhile the true winter stalwarts, from cabbages and brussels sprouts to celeriac, parsnips and leeks come into their own with the lower temperatures.
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Sweet Embrace of Winter
Cabbages and root veg not only survive in winter weather, but they actually become sweeter and less bitter. Their cell walls are tougher and they have a lower water content, which helps them tolerate freezing temperatures without damage.
Not only that, but when the temperatures drop it triggers these plants to start converting stores of starches into simple sugars: glucose, fructose and sucrose. These sugars act as a natural antifreeze, lowering the freezing point inside the plant and keeping ice crystals from forming.
It seems counter intuitive, but after two or three hard frosts brussels sprouts, kale, celeriac, parsnips etc are sweeter and less bitter than before the frost.
What Trees Tell Each Other
Many of our farmers saw a bumper crop of apples this year, what’s known as a mast year. A mast year is when a large amount of trees synchronise to suddenly produce an unusually heavy crop of fruit or nuts all at once.
Mast years are a clever survival strategy. Most years, trees keep things modest to conserve energy. But every so often, many trees of the same species synchronise and produce far more seeds than wildlife can possibly eat. This overwhelms the foragers and ensures some seeds get the chance to grow into the next generation.
It is still a mystery to us how the trees communicate with each other and decide if it will be a mast year or not. Weather definitely has something to do with it, but other than that we’re stumped.
The Golden Hoof
Even though winter has arrived, this year continues to be warmer than most. The mild spell is encouraging a late flush of growth, excellent news for farms with grazing livestock like sheep.
Traditionally, this quiet partnership between sheep and soil was so valued that farmers called it “the golden hoof.” It is a great way for organic farmers to fertilise their soil without machinery or chemicals.
As they graze, sheep do more than simply recycle the nutrients. Their manure is far more concentrated and immediately usable than the nutrients locked in the soil, leaves or roots. This fuels soil microbes, boosts fertility and helps build healthier, more resilient ground for next year’s vegetables.
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