Review: Winter Harvest Handbook by Eliot Coleman

Title: The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year-Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses
Author: Eliot Coleman
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

[su_highlight background=”#fef7a1″]Buy on Amazon: The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses[/su_highlight]

Eliot Coleman is one of the guiding lights in teaching the world how to grow organic food. There’s a good reason that so many professional writers, TV hosts, and food industry experts have raved about The Winter Harvest Handbook.

When he’s not writing books (The New Organic Grower, Four Season Harvest), Eliot Coleman is a working farmer in Maine with over 40 years of experience in all aspects of organic farming. Winter Harvest Handbook describes the crops, the tools, the planting schedules, and the techniques he uses to manage his Four Season Farm.

Most notably, Coleman has devised an ingenious system for extending the fresh harvest season for vegetables to well beyond what we normally expect – he covers his crops with mobile greenhouses. These full-size greenhouses are on rails and are moved atop garden beds on a pre-determined schedule to protect the crops from winter weather while utilizing winter sunlight for growing.

He also describes how his mobile greenhouses were inspired by the French gardens of 19th century Paris, whose growers used cloches to grow food year-round. Coleman also explains how to create fertile soil, how to market your crops and the case for using organic methods for growing food.

The Winter Harvest Handbook is a great reference book that will take its rightful place in my gardening library.