Sentient Times Dec 07/Jan 08

By the time the season ends for our traditional summer garden, we are eating out of our untraditional winter garden, a garden that begins in October and ends in May.

By Eliot Coleman

The Four-Season Harvest presents a way to eat the best food—
gardenfresh and chemical-free—all year long, with little effort or expense. Most dedicated gardeners know some season-extending techniques, but this book is not merely about season extension. It’s about gardening and eating in a manner appropriate to each season. Eliot Coleman makes nature his ally. Because his approach is biological, he focuses on plants and soil rather than high-tech structures. His tools are simple, refined to simpler, perfected as simplest. Try it for yourself. The following excerpt will start you off and steer you in the right direction. The book itself is an indispensable food growing resource.

For most of us, “eating out of the garden” is a short seasonal pleasure, unless we live in a very warm place or can afford a heated greenhouse, and the canning-freezing-drying scramble never quite compensates for summer’s loss. The traditional American vegetable garden begins in May and ends in October. For the rest of the year the frugal home-garden household must depend on shelves lined with canning jars and a well-stocked freezer. Our frugal household presents a different picture. We no longer can or freeze the summer vegetables so as to have them reappear all winter. By the time the season ends for our traditional summer garden, we are eating out of our untraditional winter garden, a garden that begins in October and ends in May.

We adore fresh food, what we call “real food,” the fresher the better. We have never considered the many-month-old embalmed remains of last summer’s harvest, whether canned or frozen, to be real food. Real food, the most pleasing to the palate and, as nutritional science increasingly reminds us, the most beneficial to health, means unprocessed whole foods like freshly harvested vegetables with all the crisp, crunchy, flavorful nutrition intact. So, when the summer vegetables are in season, we feast on beans, corn, tomatoes, and squash fresh from our summer garden. But, what about winter? What do we eat here in Maine when temperatures are frosty and snow is deep? Surprisingly, we keep right on eating fresh, home-grown food.

Our winter garden contains cold-weather foods such as spinach, tatsoi, scallions, and arugula that are as adapted to cold as the summer vegetables are to heat. The concept of a winter garden sits on the landscape like an undiscovered treasure. Undiscovered, because it seems impossible in a climate like ours where the sharp reality of winter cold intrudes. But some of us don’t accept reality without pushing its boundaries. We started challenging Jack Frost years ago. We soon had harvests extending until late fall and harvests beginning by early spring. We wanted more. Could we continue until December? Could we begin again in February? What if we adjusted our planting dates? What if we added a little more protection? Each success led to another. Eventually, we brought the latest fall harvest and the earliest spring harvest together. Voilà, the end of winter! The surprise of the winter garden is how simple it is. Winter vegetables will thrive in any winter climate with a little protection from wind and weather. No heating or high-tech systems are necessary. The keys to success are a new attitude and new crops.

A heavy wet snow is falling today. There could be a foot or more, said the radio, before its voice was silenced by a toppling tree that took out our power. It’s a beautiful snow, clumping thickly on the evergreen woods that encircle our little house and bringing them in closer like a soft white duvet. We throw on our coats and go out to the cold frames to pick a salad for dinner. The cold frames are glass-covered, bottomless wooden boxes, eight feet long and four feet wide, lined up at the back of the garden along our gravel path, as full of green bounty as the produce aisle at the local market. Lifting up the glass lids and propping them with a notched stick, we are treated to a good whiff of moist unfrozen soil. While the snow sifts about us we get busy cutting tender leaves with small serrated knives, filling a towel-lined basket. Dressed with a good olive oil and a squirt of lemon, the salad will taste like renewal—a perfect accompaniment to the leek and potato soup simmering on the back of the stove.

This fresh daily harvest goes on all year, both from our traditional outdoor summer garden and our unconventional protected winter garden. The results are sumptuous. Dinner guests habitually exclaim about the freshness and flavor of our salads and always ask, “What all is in there?” In January, for example, our answer might be “a mix of frisée endive, baby leaf spinach, Chioggia radicchio, wild arugula, miner’s lettuce, buckshorn plantain, and corn salad.” We can almost anticipate the next question.

“From where?” they query, slightly conspiratorially, expecting us to confess to expensive overnight air delivery from exotic foreign suppliers. When we tell them we harvested the salad earlier that day from our unheated winter garden, the suspicion changes to stunned disbelief. “In winter? But it’s too cold.”

“Not for these crops. They don’t mind freezing temperatures. These greens are the traditional winter peasant foods of southern France and northern Italy. Granted our winters are colder, but our simple protection makes up for the lower temperatures.”

They nod in understanding but then pause again after a few more mouthfuls. “But you don’t have enough sun way up here, do you? I mean, southern France is like Florida.”

We acknowledge it may seem like that is so, but the truth is something different. “Based on daylength and sunshine, Miami, on the 26th parallel of latitude in Florida, corresponds with the city of Luxor, near the ruins of ancient Thebes, on the shore of the Nile River in southern Egypt. In contrast, the resort town of Cannes on the Mediterranean coast of France has the same winter sunshine and daylength as the city of Portland on the Atlantic coast of Maine.”

“Maine? I can’t believe it.”

“It’s true. Most of Europe lies further north on the globe than the US does. Our farm on the 44th parallel in Maine is on the same latitude as Avignon in southern France and Genoa on the warm Ligurian coast of Italy. That means we have the same daylength and amount of sun they do.”

The visitors’ surprise and their response are not unexpected. We have received that same reaction from gardeners everywhere. In the first place, many people assume all vegetables will be killed by freezing temperatures in winter. Yet we habitually grow some thirty different crops that survive freezing temperatures with no problem when given a little protection.

Secondly, many people assume there will not be enough sunshine during the winter months. Yet we get as much sunshine as regions of the world where winter gardening is traditional. That latter fact is probably the most surprising.

It is logical to assume that warm temperatures and sunshine go hand in hand. If France has a warmer winter climate, it must be sunnier. In truth, since Avignon has more cloudy winter days than we do, there is actually more winter sunshine in Maine. That raises an obvious question. Then how come the Maine climate and the French climate are so different? Just because we are on the same latitude doesn’t necessarily mean we have the same climate. The climate difference between southern France and mid-coastal Maine is caused by forces independent of latitude. Different climates are a result of different air and ocean currents.

Whereas masses of cold arctic air moving south across Canada give the northern parts of the North American continent a mostly frozen winter, the situation in France is different. The Gulf Stream, a massive flow of warm water moving northward across the Atlantic Ocean from the Caribbean to Scandinavia, ensures that western Europe’s winter will be mostly cool and moist. Similarly, the warm Pacific currents on the west coast of the US mean that Juneau, Alaska at latitude 57° has a warmer average temperature in January than New York City at latitude 41°. If judged on temperature alone, a gardener in Juneau should have a slightly easier time growing winter vegetables than a gardener in New York. But for winter vegetable crops, temperature is not the principal deciding factor. Daylength—the amount of available sunlight—is.

And that brings us back to latitude. Latitude determines daylength and the quantity of potential sunlight available to a winter gardener. Places around the globe at the same latitude will have the same daylength. Thus our Maine farm in the northeastern corner of the US shares a “sun line” with those parts of France, previously mentioned, which lie on the same 44th parallel. Places to the north of that line, such as the rest of northern Europe, have less winter gardening potential than we do. And places to the south of that line, which includes 85 percent of the US, have better sun for winter vegetable gardening than Mediterranean France. We should make better use of it.

We are long-time devotees of four-season food production and, to tell the truth, we haven’t been doing too badly making use of both winter and summer sunshine. We do this because we love to eat good fresh food and share it with our friends. Our four-season harvest is based on a simple premise. Whereas the growing season may be chiefly limited to the warmer months, the harvest season has no such limits. We enjoy a year-round harvest by following two practices: succession planting and crop protection. Succession planting means sowing vegetables more than once. Sowings at one- to three-week intervals during the growing season will extend the fresh harvest of summer crops for as long as possible. Midsummer to late-summer sowings of hardy crops begin the transition to the cool months. That is where crop protection takes over.

Crop protection means vegetables under cover. The traditional winter vegetables are very hardy. They will survive the fiercest cold under a blanket of snow. Since we can’t count on snow cover, we substitute simple protective structures such as cold frames and plastic-covered tunnels. Many delicious winter vegetables need only this minimal protection to yield through the winter. All it takes are seeds of some familiar and unfamiliar hardy vegetables, a little crop protection, and a dose of innovative thinking.

The innovative thinking involves realizing that only the harvest season, and not the growing season, needs to be extended. The distinction is important because the harvest season can be extended with cool-weather vegetables and simple crop protection. Extending the growing season, however, involves adding or collecting heat, storing heat, adding insulation to protect that heat, and providing extra lighting for long-day summer crops. Growing-season extension is highly technological. Harvest-season extension is basically biological. It is also just plain logical. The harvest is what you eat.

We prefer not to define our simple crop protection method as “unheated,” because that makes it sound as if we are not doing something—heating—that we should be doing. The reason our protection is unheated is because heating is not necessary. We often avoid the word “greenhouse” since many people assume that a greenhouse, if unheated, is a super-insulated technological marvel or a complicated heat-storage device. Ours is neither. The best short statement to describe our approach to the four-season garden is a quote from Buckminster Fuller in his book Shelter (1932): “Don’t fight forces; use them.” Instead of bemoaning the forces of winter and trying to fight them by adding heat, we have limited our intervention to the climatic protection provided by one or two translucent layers. Instead of trying to grow heat-loving crops during cold weather, we have said, “So it’s cold, great! What likes cold?” The answer is some thirty or more hardy vegetables.

Fighting force requires energy, and energy costs money. Our approach is to take advantage of everything that a translucent layer can get for free from the sun and the residual heat of the soil mass. In our minds, we have created an inexpensive “protected microclimate” and then found the plants that will thrive in that microclimate. The same applies in reverse during the summer. When those protected microclimates are extra warm, we don’t fight that warmth with motorized greenhouse cooling systems. We use it to grow heatloving crops.

Fresh harvesting all year round makes life simpler and easier in a number of ways. Since most of the fall, winter, and spring crops are planted in midsummer to late summer in spaces vacated by summer crops, this system results in year-round eating without year-round gardening. By extending the harvest, you also spread out the work. All the planting doesn’t have to be done at once in the spring, and all the harvesting isn’t crowded into the late summer. Instead of being a series of chores (putting in the garden, weeding the garden, harvesting, and canning and freezing) with rather rigid time frames, home food production becomes a part of the whole year. The four-season gardener doesn’t have a date, such as Memorial Day (traditional in New England), to put in the garden. That’s because there is no goal called “putting in the garden.” The garden is in all the time. The goal is to eat well.

Is this more time-consuming? Not at all. It is certainly more pleasurable. The four-season harvest is a different arrangement of time and a different appreciation of the importance of quality food. It will free you from the chores of food preservation and trips to the market. You will always have fresh food in the garden—crisp and delicious. You will have set up a system that features many different vegetables in their respective seasons rather than a limited list of vegetables suitable only for the summer season. The amount of work comes out about the same over the course of the year. The benefits are that the joys of a fresh harvest continue through all four seasons and the food is more nutritious and varied.

If year-round gardening is such a great concept, why isn’t everyone doing it? One reason could be that in many people’s minds, the idea of supplying most of their food seems like a large, complicated chore outside of their experience. But the truth is that growing food is the most basic activity of human civilization, not some mysterious industrial process. You do not need a large-scale operation. Your food is now produced in bits and pieces around the year. You are integrating the garden into your life the same way you integrate other important activities, such as helping your children with homework, playing catch and talking with them, sharing in household chores, and helping out the neighbors. You don’t hire others to do those jobs. You do them yourself because they are meaningful, joyful, and important to your family’s spiritual welfare. Your food is of no less importance.

The impressive list of benefits from the four-season harvest is what motivates us to encourage others to give it a try. The first benefit is freshness. Nutritionists agree fresh is best and nothing is fresher than the home garden. All the vitamins and all the flavor the food is meant to have are there for you to enjoy. The carrots have crunch, the salad greens have crisp, the spinach is full of life. Week-old salads on the produce shelf can’t compare with those that go from soil to salad bowl on the same day. Good chefs know this, the rare old-fashioned ones who shop the farmers’ markets daily. And gardeners knew it long before the chefs.

The next benefit is variety. We love to eat with the seasons. Just as we have chosen to live in a place where spring, summer, fall, and winter are very different from one another, we like our menu to reflect this. Certain tastes and seasons go together—eating raw peas on the first sweaterless days; roasted corn at a beach picnic; pumpkin pie on a festive fall weekend; endive and mâche salad with roasted beets on a day when you’re glad the wood stove is warm. As we have searched for new winter crops, we have been amazed at the wealth of choices.

The third benefit is quality. We are not vegetarians, but we eat a lot of vegetables and salads. They are our favorite foods. We want to know that what we eat has been grown on exceptional soil nourished with all the organic matter and minerals plants need. Since the government bureaucracy has displayed such dismal incompetence protecting us against the dangers of agricultural chemicals, we have decided to make the decisions ourselves. We no longer need to wonder, “Where has this lettuce been and what have they done to it?” Given the impressive statistics showing the nutritional importance of vegetables, we want to get all the minerals, soluble fiber, beta carotene, folic acid, and other positives without any regrets.

The fourth benefit is simplicity. We have been pleasantly surprised at how easy it can be to grow fresh winter food. The first step was to realize that we aren’t gardening in winter, just harvesting. All the gardening was done in late summer and early fall when we planted most of these crops. Furthermore, biology is on our side. The crops that succeed in winter are those that like cool weather. Most fruiting crops such as corn, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, or eggplants need the heat of summer to do well. But the majority of the leafy crops need the cooler conditions of fall-winter-spring if they are to taste good. This is their traditional time of year. Most gardeners know how quickly spinach bolts when warm weather arrives. The same is true for other cool-weather greens: arugula is very sharp-tasting in summer; radicchio and other chicories turn bitter; mâche won’t germinate when the soil is too warm or days are long. Cold weather brings out the best in these leafy crops, making them tender and sweet. Recently many of the traditional European cool-season crops, such as mâche, radicchio, Belgian endive, arugula, and dandelion, have been discovered by upscale restaurateurs. There is now a demand to have them available all year. How dull. We look forward to mâche and endive in the winter. That is their season, and they are fresh and alive, while corn and beans are limp specimens on the supermarket produce shelf or ice-encrusted in the store’s freezer.

Doesn’t this seasonality limit the meals? Not at all. Rather than being restricting, this garden larder is liberating and inspirational. Instead of canned or frozen peas in November, you eat fresh broccoli, crisp sugarloaf chicory, or a piquant sorrel soup. Instead of stale California head lettuce, your February salad is made from fresh mâche, Belgian endive, claytonia, and arugula. Canned corn in April? No way, when your garden offers fresh ingredients for creamed spinach, parsnip tempura, or a dandelion soufflé.

In our grandfathers’ day, people celebrated the seasonality and variety of the home garden. They knew that one cabbage tasted best fresh in June and that another made the best sauerkraut. This was the pea for eating fresh and that the one for drying. They were familiar with fifty different apples and twenty kinds of pears. They knew when these were ripe and which blended best for cider or complemented the flavor of this or that cheese. We can recover such civilized living again.

How do you begin a four-season garden? You can start on an area no larger than a tablecloth. Plant one or two short rows of a few salad crops. Then next week, plant a few more short rows of other crops. Now you’re rolling. Less than a month after initiating the process, you will be eating radishes. There are also the early thinnings of spinach, beets, lettuce, and cabbage to add to your salads. Since you will plant many crops in succession, there will be plenty of thinnings. But since you are gardening for the table, there is no chore called “thinning the seedlings.” There is only a sequence whereby you thin enough to add to a salad today, thin more for a stir-fry tomorrow, and thin yet again for soup the next day. The act of thinning not only feeds you but also enables future bounty by providing more room for the remaining plants.

As each crop stops producing, you clean off the area, spread a little more compost, and replant it with another vegetable suited to the advancing season. Thus, the warm-weather plantings are replaced by more cold-tolerant varieties and eventually by hardy winter crops. The vegetables for fresh winter eating and the earliest spring sowings are protected by cold frames or tunnels. Wintered-over crops and outdoor spring sowings pick up the process in spring.

Once the year-round harvest has begun to flow, the productivity is unbelievable. Let’s say you want fresh salads every day from your garden. There are about two dozen popular salad crops, all of them easily grown in the home garden. Some, such as tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and New Zealand spinach, are limited to the warm months. Others, such as lettuce, beets, cabbage, scallions, and Swiss chard, are spring, summer, and fall crops. Spinach, radishes, kohlrabi, mizuna, and peas do best in the cool months. Mâche, sorrel, arugula, escarole, endive, chicory, and claytonia will feed you daily from the winter garden even in the coldest climates. Carrots, parsley, onions, kale and sorrel can be harvested almost year-round. The edges of those categories will overlap depending on your climatic zone, but the message is clear: year-round fresh salads offer all the variety anyone could want.

If you don’t have the space for that impressive salad bar lineup, how about growing your salad mixed? You can sow lettuce and other salad greens together, as in the popular mesclun combinations (from a French Provençal word indicating a combination of many ingredients). With mesclun, you harvest the leaves young on a cut- and-come-again basis to make a ready-mixed salad. This is a wonderful option for those who have less time and space to garden and wish to get more variety from each planting. Since the different mesclun mixes are adaptable to a wide range of temperatures and maturity dates, they will yield fresh salads over a good portion of the year from half a dozen succession sowings.

Not only is there a progression from one crop to another, but there is also a progression within crops. Beets become more than beets. They are appreciated as thinnings for a salad, young greens for steaming, baby beets for a cold summer borscht, and eventually large beets for pickling and winter storage. A multi-use pea, such as the sugar snap type, can be used as snow peas when young, as snap peas when mature, and shelled for green peas in between. Since short rows of many crops can be planted successively during their season, the process also repeats itself, like the singing of a round.

Turning a one-season into a four-season garden invokes those marvelous human beings we all have been fortunate to know in our lives who, even in old age, keep themselves spiritually young. It is obvious why they are such refreshing company; they never stop participating, learning, producing, and contributing. That is exactly the spirit represented by the four-season garden. Specific seasons come and go, but the spirit perseveres throughout the year. In the future you can avoid the end-of-season feeling by cleaning up each crop as it matures and replanting that area. The four-season garden is perpetually renewed and always looks like spring and summer. Like those treasured friends, this garden is refreshing to be around, and it encourages your participation.

Let’s take a moment to discuss the benefits of organic gardening. No fearful tales are involved. I have no moral sermon. I have no plan to drown you in pages of factual data. Our home garden is organic, as it has been for thirty years, for a very practical reason. Organic methods are simpler and work better. That’s right, they work better. Chemical agriculture is one of the great myths of the 20th century. The chemical salespeople swear that chemical fertilizers and pesticides are indispensable. In our experience, they are totally superfluous. They are necessary only as a crutch for the weaknesses of industrial food production.

Basically, organic gardening means a partnership with nature. Nature’s gardeners are numerous and eager to help. Millions of beneficial organisms (everything from bacteria to earthworms to ground beetles) thrive in a fertile soil, and they make things go right if the gardener encourages them. The gardener does that by understanding the natural processes of the soil and aiding them with compost. The inherent stability and resilience of natural systems can be on your side if you work with them. Organic gardening is a great adventure, an expedition into a deeper and more satisfying understanding of vegetable production. You are now a participant rather than a spectator. You share creation.

A delightful bonus of organic soil care is the quality of the vegetables. To us, food is not a commodity to be produced as cheaply as possible. It is the living matter that fuels our systems. We agree with the conclusion of many other organic growers around the world that crops grown in a fertile soil are higher in food quality. It is not just the absence of the negatives—pesticides and chemicals—that makes the difference. It is also the presence of the positives. Whether the difference in composition is due to the amount of enzymes, the amino acid balance, trace minerals, unknown factors, or all of the above is yet to be determined. There are many theories. There is also increasing evidence that the biological quality of plants is vitally important because it determines the content of those plant substances which benefit human health. We are convinced that future investigations will confirm the value of food quality, just as present research has already confirmed the essential place of vegetables in the diet.

Since the key to vegetable quality is the quality of the soil in which the vegetables are grown, you want to have good raw material for the roots of your plants to forage in. Soil quality is influenced by the practices of the gardener. For a soil to be truly alive and productive, it must contain plenty of organic matter, plus the full spectrum of minerals. The soil can then feed the vegetables. A vital, alive soil will produce vital, alive vegetables.

In the pages of The Four-Season Harvest, you will find an outline for a four-season harvest system for the home garden. It’s the result of years of refining and adapting ideas from around the world. These techniques are tried and true enough to guarantee that they will work. If you have no preferences of your own, this is a good place to start. But don’t stop with this model. You can do better. Always be curious enough to adjust and fine-tune. Over the years, you have put your own stamp on many other important activities you do regularly. Anything as much a part of your life as your food supply should be as personal as possible.

Eliot Coleman has over 30 years experience in all aspects of organic farming, including field vegetables, greenhouse vegetables, rotational grazing of cattle and sheep, and range poultry. He is also the author of The New Organic Grower and the Winter Harvest Manual, also from Chelsea Green Publishing, www.chelseagreen.com.

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Mesclun mix, arugula, mustard greens, spinach, bok choy, romaine and butter lettuce, cilantro and kale seed were planted in this raised bed in southern Oregon (elev. 2100’) on August 18. Parsley had been planted in the spring; in late July carrots were seeded and scallions transplanted from flats. The first photo was taken in mid-October before the first frost; the second photo was taken the morning after a covering of reemay (a spun polyester fiber cloth) was placed on the frame in anticipation of low nighttime temperatures which went down to 25 degrees.