5 Things That Buy Your Garden Six More Weeks

The pick

Floating Row Cover, 10x50 ft

$30.99 on Amazon

Row cover is spun fabric light enough to lay on plants, and it buys a few crucial degrees of frost protection while passing most light and all rain - which is the difference between lettuce in November and lettuce in compost. The same roll is the pest barrier over spring brassicas.

Buy the big roll; small ones vanish into a season and shipping is most of the cost.

The pick

Fiberglass Garden Hoops, 6 Sets

$9.99 on Amazon

Cover laid straight on plants works for a light frost, but wet fabric frozen onto leaves does its own damage. Hoops hold the cover off the canopy, trap a real air layer, and shed snow - turning a frost trick into a structure that keeps spinach alive into December.

Half-inch PVC bent over rebar stubs makes the same hoops from the hardware store.

The pick

Snap Clamps for Row Cover

$8.85 on Amazon

The first windy night finds every tunnel held down with rocks and good intentions, and the cover ends up in the neighbour's hedge with the frost on your kale. Snap clamps grip the fabric to the hoop itself, so the tunnel opens for harvest and closes again without re-burying edges.

Clamp the fabric to every hoop and still weight the ends; wind works the corners first.

The pick

Frost Blanket, 1.8 oz, 10x33 ft

$26.99 on Amazon

The all-season row cover handles 29 degrees; it does not handle the Halloween polar dip. A heavy-weight blanket buys eight degrees or more - the difference that carries tender greens across one killing night and into the three mild weeks that so often follow it.

Too heavy to live on plants full-time - deploy for the cold snap, then roll it back up.

The pick

Taylor Soil Thermometer

$8.63 on Amazon

Season extension runs both directions, and the spring side fails by planting into cold soil - seed that rots at 45 degrees would have sprouted in a week at 60. A soil thermometer read at 9am tells you when each crop's real season starts, usually weeks before the calendar says so under cover.

Morning readings, three days running - one warm afternoon spike is not spring.