Associated Articles
The Ethicurean
Grow-hio: Midwestern farmers rely on Eliot Coleman’s advice for cold-weather farming
By Jennifer M. aka Baklava Queen @ 12:12 pm on 28 December 2009.
As winter approaches, even the most knowledgeable of local-foods-loving shoppers have wondered what fresh produce they will find over the winter months, and the opening of a year-round market here in Wooster has only increased the frequency of that musing. Happily, I can point to a handful of our producer members who are likely to have greens and other vegetables coming from their high tunnels or hoop houses, taking a page from Eliot Coleman, the all-season farmer from Maine and author of the new book "The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses
."
Coleman has established himself in recent years as an innovative organic farmer working in challenging conditions and finding ingenious solutions. His key suggestion for growing fresh crops throughout even the harsh Maine winters involves the use of unheated greenhouses paired with floating row covers to increase the temperature around tender crops. This system has evolved to include movable cold houses that can be shifted from summer hot house crops such as tomatoes over to summer-started winter crops of greens and roots. By getting a jump start while the days are long enough to promote growth, the plants reach near-maturity before the days shorten significantly, and they can then be picked in succession throughout the winter months.
"In other words," Coleman explains, "we were not extending the growing season as one hopes to do in a heated greenhouse but, rather, we were extending the harvest season."
Over the past few decades, he has tried other solutions, such as brief minimal heating in the greenhouses and a wider variety of crops, and "The Winter Harvest Handbook" brings his previous books (especially "Four-Season Harvest") up to date. Through all the testing and use of different methods, he has kept the goals of simplicity, low cost, and energy efficiency in mind. The farm's processes have also been organized carefully: "We aim for a goal of never leaving a greenhouse bed unplanted, and we come pretty close."
Read the whole article here.
boston.com
Back to the garden
By Jan Gardner
May 10, 2009
With the economy in the doldrums and first lady Michelle Obama having planted a vegetable garden at the White House, growing your own food is suddenly the thing to do. New books offer help to novices as well as experienced hands.
[...]
For those who want to grow vegetables year-round, Maine farmer Eliot Coleman has written "The Winter Harvest Handbook" (Chelsea Green), based on his decades of experimentation with movable unheated plastic greenhouses. Among Coleman's devotees is Martha Stewart, who harvests fresh vegetables and salad greens throughout the winter from her "cold house" in Bedford, N.Y.
suite101.com
You Can Harvest Your Garden All Year Round
The Four Secrets of Year-Round Vegetable Gardening Revealed
© Deborah Bier
May 12, 2009
By practicing the four secrets of winter gardening, local climate conditions are largely removed, leaving the power and strength of the sun to grow your crops. Here they are in a nutshell: provide a small amount of cover for the plants, choose the right plants to grow, have them at full maturity by the time there are only 10 hours of light daily, and don't water them over the winter.
The small amount of cover can be a greenhouse, hoop house or cold frame plus the polyspun floating row cover fabric. The right plants are the many winter hardy vegetables found among the mustard, cole, onion, lettuce and beet families. For full maturity, starting them in late summer and growing them unprotected through the pre-frost part of the fall will give you the mature plants you want. And not providing them with extra water in the coldest months means they will not turn into piles of mush once they freeze.
The reason for maturity is that during the most wintry months, the plants will not grow once the sunlight stays below about 10 hours daily. They enter into a kind of suspended animation, and re-start their growth again when the hours of light lengthen as the season moves along.
Protecting the plants from experiencing freezing temperatures is not the point, believe it or not. Well-chosen varieties will be able to experience being frozen for a period of time. It is due to the protection you give them that they will thaw out at some point during the day, and can be ready to harvest when you want them.
They will over time get a little worn out from the repeated freezing and thawing, but you will be withholding water from them to prevent their cell walls from exploding when they freeze, which is what turns plants into piles of brown, smelly decaying matter after that first killing frost melts. Give them enough water during their growing time, and most will make it through to provide you with a fresh harvest during the darkest weeks.
With the protection afforded by a cold frame, greenhouse or hoop house -- all plus floating row cover -- you can also get a jump on spring planting and extend the summer and fall growing seasons.
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