The Winter Harvest Handbook

Choosing local­ly grown organ­ic food is a sus­tain­able liv­ing trend that’s tak­en hold through­out North America. Celebrated farm­ing expert Eliot Coleman helped start this move­ment with The New Organic Grower pub­lished 20 years ago. He con­tin­ues to lead the way, push­ing the lim­its of the har­vest sea­son while work­ing his world-renowned organ­ic farm in Harborside, Maine.

Now, with his long-await­ed new book, The Winter Harvest Handbook, any­one can have access to his hard-won expe­ri­ence. Gardeners and farm­ers can use the inno­v­a­tive, high­ly suc­cess­ful meth­ods Coleman describes in this com­pre­hen­sive hand­book to raise crops through­out the cold­est of winters.

Building on the tech­niques that hun­dreds of thou­sands of farm­ers and gar­den­ers adopt­ed from The New Organic Grower and Four-Season Harvest, this new book focus­es on grow­ing pro­duce of unpar­al­leled fresh­ness and qual­i­ty in cus­tomized unheat­ed or, in some cas­es, min­i­mal­ly heat­ed, mov­able plas­tic greenhouses.

Coleman offers clear, con­cise details on green­house con­struc­tion and main­te­nance, plant­i­ng sched­ules, crop man­age­ment, har­vest­ing prac­tices, and even mar­ket­ing meth­ods in this com­plete, metic­u­lous, and illus­trat­ed guide. Readers have access to all the tech­niques that have proven to pro­duce high­er-qual­i­ty crops on Coleman’s own farm.

His painstak­ing research and exper­i­men­ta­tion with more than 30 dif­fer­ent crops will be valu­able to small farm­ers, home­stead­ers, and expe­ri­enced home gar­den­ers who seek to expand their pro­duc­tion seasons.

A pas­sion­ate advo­cate for the revival of small-scale sus­tain­able farm­ing, Coleman pro­vides a prac­ti­cal mod­el for sup­ply­ing fresh, local­ly grown pro­duce dur­ing the win­ter sea­son, even in cli­mates where con­ven­tion­al wis­dom says it ​“just can’t be done.”