Books We Like: The Winter Harvest Handbook

I first heard about greenhouse guru Eliot Coleman from Jesse Hopkins, farm manager of Colinwood Farm in Port Townsend and the star of our video about four-season farming in the Pacific Northwest. Jesse said that if Coleman could grow vegetables year-round in Eastern Maine, it should be even easier for him to grow salad greens in the winter on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington.

Because of his success, there's plenty of hype surrounding Coleman and his farm in Harborside, ME. Since he started experimenting with greenhouse production in the mid-1990s, rumors have swirled that Coleman grows vegetables in unheated greenhouses in the Maine winter, and that he even has a lemon tree. Those rumors are all true.

Coleman's latest book, The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year-Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses, lays out his four-season farming methods in plain English. This is Coleman's second book on the topic of greenhouse farming - his first was the self-published manual, Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables From Your Home Garden All Year Long - and it's written for serious farmers and backyard gardeners alike.

The first secret to Coleman's success is that he doesn't try to grow warm-weather crops in his unheated greenhouses. (The lemon tree is in the only heated greenhouse on the farm.) Coleman says that not only can some hearty greens tolerate cold conditions, but "they actually thrive and are sweeter, tenderer, and more flavorful." Another key is planting at the right time for winter harvest, and for Coleman, that means planting winter crops in the beginning of August, during what he calls the "second spring."

Coleman walks his readers through the historical inspiration for winter farming, crediting mid-19th century Parisian growers with developing the technique. From the Europeans, Coleman borrowed another handy innovation: mobile greenhouses, which enable him to plant winter greens outside in August while using the greenhouses to grown heat-loving crops, like tomatoes.

"Extending the season to the whole year (or at least most of it) means that we can hold our markets, keep our crew employed, and provide a more balanced year-round income," Coleman writes in the introduction. Hopefully, more organic farmers around the country will be able to do the same.

-Mark