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By DAPHNE HUTCHINSON
Rappahannock New« Contributing Writer
Outfitted with peat pots and vermiculite, early seed varieties and flats, gardeners join the annual race to bring in a crop of spring greens. To the victor goes the honor of tossing the first salad of homegrown lettuce or spinach, sometimes weeks before neighboring vegetable farmers have even sewn their Black Seed Simpson.
But this year’s race, at least in Rappahannock County, is no contest. A communal garden worked by Sid and Margaret Gottlieb and Bob and Sylvia Gowell of Blackwater Homestead near Boston is already producing lettuce, cabbage, cress, and radishes. In fact, they’ve had salad greens all winter long, grown in a manure-heated cold frame.
The very tips of the lettuce leaves were nipped when the mercury plummeted to minus 12 degrees, but otherwise the winter garden has flourished in spite of record-breaking cold spells.
Vegetables in Blackwater’s communal garden are normally grown in raised beds, 20 feet long by four feet wide. The two cold frames fit over a single raised bed .with four feet of leftover space separating the two sections.
“The length of the cold frames was dictated by the size of exolite panel we thought we could handle easily,” Sid Gottlieb explained.
The exolite in the cold frame is the same glass-like material used for the windows in the passive solar home at Blackwater Homestead. It admits both heat and ultraviolet rays.
“For ease of handling, we decided on panels eight feet long,” Gottlieb
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