Moving Kale Indoors for a Rough Winter

How to move your kale indoors if you’re having a extra cold, rough Winter.  This will make sure your kale will survive for a  few extra months!

My prediction is that we might have a bad Winter this year.  Already in the garden Upstate we have nights in the 20’s and a few days of snow.   Plus I saw a white wooly bear caterpillar in the woods and Google told me they were signs of a deep Winter approaching.  The garden is pretty much done for the year minus the collards, Brussels Sprouts and kale.   The collards and Brussels Sprouts will call it quits when they’re ready to but I really wanted to save the kale.  Even though kale is pretty hearty and can withstand cold frost temperatures,  it gets very cold in the mountains so I decided to bring it inside our greenhouse to live for the next few months to make sure it survives.

Like my post on bringing pepper plants indoors for the Winter, this has similar instructions.  We dig up the plants carefully and then transplant to new pots.  We’ll water the plants weekly.    Even though it takes a little work to get them dug up, it’s worth it to have fresh vegetables throughout the Winter if you are in a cold climate.

This is our bed of kale.  It’s still looking good but the drop of temperatures caused it’s lower leaves to start to die. Time to save the kale so I can make Kale Salad!

Very carefully with a shovel dig the plant out. If you feel like you are snagging on a plant root, trace it with your hands and dig it out – careful, try not to rip any roots!   This is one kale plant dug up.

Once you dig it up, replant it in a large pot. How big? Well it depends on the size of the kale. Whatever the size you want to make sure you bury it’s roots completely, just like you never touched it. Because I’m doing some experimental greenhouse growing this year I decided to use my GreenStalk vertical growing system (here’s the Amazon version of it) which let me re-plant about 15 of our kale plants.

I keep these kale plants in our greenhouse but you could also bring them inside your home and place them near the window or patio door.

Just make sure to keep the plants watered and you’ll have kale all Winter long!