Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long

In a conversational tone – like you leaned over the fence and asked for advice from the neighbor with the enviable garden – the author explains how to keep on producing salad greens and a variety of other crops right through the winter and into spring, without breaking the bank on a heated greenhouse. “This book won't discuss heat pumps, thermal mass, solar gain, or R factors because they are too complicated. They make the simple joys of food production seem more industrial than poetic. Given the option, we choose poetry.” [pg 79]

The idea here is that you can grow whatever they grow at your latitude in Europe, where they have the same day length, so long as you provide some protection to offset the difference in climate. It's show more not about providing warmth, but providing protection from freezing and the rapid weather changes of the US climate which stress and kill winter plants. He covers simple, easy-to-use season-extenders such as cold frames, low tunnels, and row covers, and more complicated ones such as greenhouses and high tunnels (known around here as poly tunnels). Your food will be seasonal – not the perpetual summer you get with a heated greenhouse – but it will be fresh from the garden. Coleman, who lives in Maine, is about even (latitudinally) with southwestern France, which he visited in the winter to see what they were growing and how. Throughout the book, he relates anecdotes about his trip to show what can be done with or without complicated systems and equipment, and the variety of food plants (some new, some old, some new again) that can be produced. The system is simple, requiring more planning than physical work. With careful planning and well-timed planting and greenhouse moving you can extend every season and out-produce every other gardener on the block. He makes it sound both easy and downright magical. If we had the space for one I'd be out there right now, setting one up so we could start a CSA! show less

The writing is conversational and full of reminisces. It's as though the author is afraid the reader's head will explode if the reader gets all the information she's after at once. There are helpful charts---unfortunately not conveniently gathered in a single appendix, but sprinkled throughout the book. To get at the information that supplements those charts, the reader has to wade through vaguely related prose. That said, the information is very useful so I'd recommend it to anyone interested in gardening in places where it freezes.

I absolutely must buy this. Am building a cold frame leanto garden on my house right now because of this book. It claims I can have salad year round. Does it get to be -50 in Maine?

Great resource for extending vegetable harvest and raising a winter vegetable garden. We've built the cold frames, now if we would get off our duff and plant the seeds at the appropriate time of year, we may have fresh salad for January meals!

"Wonderful guide to affordable, sensible four-season vegetable gardening, with plenty of detail and inspiration."

Wonderful guide to affordable, sensible four-season vegetable gardening, with plenty of detail and inspiration.

Excellent resource.