blog: coopette.com: Book Review: The Winter Harvest Handbook

Book Review: The Winter Harvest Handbook

You may be wondering whether I actually go out in the garden anymore, since I obviously spend a lot of time indoors reading gardening books. I do – but recently I have been involved in fairly dull stuff like weeding, mulching and hefting compost from the driveway round to the back garden. It’s not exciting stuff, so I’m saving you from reading about it.

Anyway, the nice people at Chelsea Green (follow them on Twitter) sent me a copy of Eliot Coleman’s latest book last week – “The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year-round vegetable production using deep-organic techniques and unheated greenhouses”.

I have a confession to make at this point. I own a copy of one of Coleman’s earlier books – “Four-Season Harvest: Organic vegetables from your home garden all year long” and I’ve never managed to finish it. It’s full of really interesting stuff, but it’s a bit dense.

The new book is a much easier read. In fact, the early chapters are downright entertaining. There’s a lot about how Four Season Farm has developed its winter harvesting techniques, and some insights into the history of winter harvests that are fascinating. And it’s at this point that I should mention that this is a book 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) and am now inspired to put together a proper winter harvest plan for my Grow Dome that I can implement in midsummer. 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 “The Winter Harvest Handbook”, so I will have to make the effort to go back and read that one in full :)