About book The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep Organic Techniques And Unheated Greenhouses (2000)
Eliot Colemen is, without a doubt, the godfather of year around gardening in the same way Joel Salitin is the godfather of modern sustainable agriculture, and as with Salitin, you have to take a huge dose of the man that is Coleman to get to the incredible information he brings to his books. For me, his attitude comes off as near condescension of anyone who does not see his brilliance, and that impression makes his books incredibly hard to read, especially as a fellow sustainable practitioner.That said, the information he does provide is without parallel and is indispensable to anyone seeking to learn to produce garden variety food year around. The early chapters of the Winter Harvest Handbook are downright entertaining. There’s a lot about how Coleman's Four Season Farm has developed its winter harvesting techniques, and some insights into the history of winter harvests that are fascinating. The book is clearly aimed at the American market. Not only are the temperatures all in Fahrenheit, but there are frequent mentions of USDA climate zones and the fact that winter harvests are (or have been, in the past) far more commonplace in Europe than the US. But there is a nice section on latitude and day length that explains (with reference to polar bears) how winter growing is different in the UK than in the US. In essence, although the Gulf Stream gives us a warmer climate, our higher latitude gives us shorter winter days.And the length of those days is important, because the two limiting factors to growth in winter are the low temperatures and short days. Once the day length drops under 10 hours, plant growth effectively stops. Coleman’s winter harvest technique has three aspects – protected cropping, hardy vegetables and successional sowing – but the timing of sowings is crucial if plants are to be large enough to provide a harvest overwinter, but still young enough to be more hardy.The next set of chapters has all of the technical information you need to work out a winter harvest schedule of your own. A lot of it is aimed at farm-scale growers; most gardeners won’t have the space to implement a movable greenhouse or need mechanical sowing devices. The chapters on marketing and economics are interesting, though, as are the anecdotes about Coleman’s customer base that occur throughout the text.The pests and diseases chapter will make many gardeners howl in frustration – because Coleman doesn’t really have these problems. His biggest pests are voles, and he looks on the arrival of aphids as a helpful indication that his growing conditions are not spot-on.The final chapter is a highly personal statement of Coleman’s organic ethics. He supports small-scale, local growers and believes their produce is best for both the planet and consumers. He sees industrial scale ‘organic’ farming as nothing more than greenwash, without the underlying philosophy that makes organic worth something. I agree with him, and its clear that his ideas have a thorough grounding in science, as he spends a lot of time reading through agricultural research to improve and enhance his growing techniques.I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book (although I skimmed the highly technical farming information that just isn’t relevant on a garden scale). The only thing lacking in this book, from a gardener’s perspective, is detailed information about the crops that the farm grows. There is only limited detail here – but there is a lot more on crops in “Four Season Harvest”.
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May need to buy this when we set up the farm.
—pineeucy
