Year-Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses

Winter Harvest Handbook

The

Eliot Coleman

Chelsea Green PublishingWhite River Junction, Vermont802-295-6300www.chelseagreen.com

Cover design by Peter Holm • Cover photo by Amanda Marsalis

$29.95 USD

The W

inter Harvest H

andbook

From the bestselling author of The New Organic Grower and Four-Season Harvest, a revolutionary guide to year-round, cold-climate harvests

of fresh, organic produce—with little or no energy inputs.

“ How do you produce first-rate food all year-round in northern places? This is the big question facing the local food movement, and Eliot Coleman, one of America’s most innovative farmers, has come up with excellent answers. . . . The Winter Harvest Handbook is an indispensable contribution.”

—Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food

“ I have been a devotee of Eliot’s for years, fully agreeing with his methods for growing in winter, spring, summer, and fall, tasty, nutritious produce with a minimum consumption of fossil fuels. Congratulations on another volume of useful, practical, sensible, and enlightening information.”

—Martha Stewart, best-selling author, magazine publisher, and television host

“ Eliot Coleman’s books have been called Bibles for small farmers and home gardeners. I suspect that’s because he writes about not just gardening but about everything that connects to good food and pleasure; a Renaissance man for a new generation, he’ll quote Goethe in the same breath as Ghandi, and as a result, you’ll dig, weed, eat, think, and live more fully.”

—Dan Barber, Chef, Blue Hill and Blue Hill Stone Barns

“ If we are going to create a good, clean, fair food system, we’ve got to learn how to grow affordable, local food year-round and make a living at it. Eliot Coleman knows more about this than anyone I’ve met. Here he gives the detailed information needed to make it work.”

—Josh Viertel, President, Slow Food USA

The Winter Harvest Handbook takes the local-food revolution to a new level. Eliot Coleman explains how to successfully—and profitably—harvest fresh vegetables all year-round in even the coldest climates using 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 meticulous, illustrated guide. His painstaking research and experimentation with more than 30 different crops will prove invaluable to small farmers, homesteaders, and experienced home gardeners who seek to expand their production and harvest seasons.

ISBN 978-1-60358-081-6

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82 The Winter Harvest Handbook

Spinach

If we were to grow only one leafy winter crop, it would be spin-ach. We sell spinach both as small leaves in the salad mixes and as large leaves for bulk sales. In both cases we harvest only whole leaves without stems. This is slower work than harvest-ing entire plants, but we continue to do it because it is worth it: the regrowth is much better, which means greater total yield per square foot, and the quality of the product is exceptional enough to command a commensurate price. We harvest with a very sharp small-bladed (bird’s-beak) knife and find we have become very efficient with practice.

In our climate spinach planted outdoors during the second to third week of September in well-composted soil and then covered with a greenhouse by late October is ready to harvest for Thanksgiving sales. The plants continue to produce, yield-ing four more harvests per bed until late March/early April. We devote almost half of our total greenhouse space to winter spin-ach. For more on spinach, see pages 36 and 126.

Leeks

Leeks are almost a year-round crop for us and would be all-year if the winter leeks did not sell out so quickly. We get our first crop in May from transplanting extra early seedlings to a cold house. (Seeds are sown February 15 in our plant-starting greenhouse.) Then we sell outdoor-grown summer leeks through September and the fall leeks through November. Winter leeks are avail-able from early December until we are sold out, usually in early March. We use a different leek variety for each season. The summer and fall leeks are harvested directly from the field with the additional protection of a sheet of plastic over the last of the fall leeks during the second half of November. We protect the winter leeks with a movable greenhouse starting in early December. We add an inner layer from mid-December on until all the leeks are sold.

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Winter Crops 83

The edible part of a leek is the white blanched stem. The more length a blanched leek stem has, the better the product. Blanching can be accomplished by hill-ing soil up against the stems of the leeks. However, in our expe-rience, the key to growing leeks efficiently and intensively is to grow your own transplants and dibble them into deep plant-ing holes. By dibbling in the transplants rather than having to hill-up soil as the leeks grow, we are able to plant them more intensively—as closely as three rows on a 30-inch bed with the leeks 4 inches apart in the row.

Unlike many of our other crops, we don’t grow our leek trans-plants in soil blocks. Instead, we grow them on the floor in our plant-starting greenhouse in 30-inch-wide-by-8-foot-long-by-3-inch-deep seedbeds with wooden sides filled with potting soil. We sow leek seeds directly into these beds using the six-row

Leeks with long blanched shanks from deep planting.

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84 The Winter Harvest Handbook

seeder (see chapter 13). We allow the seedlings to grow in these beds until they are at least 10 inches tall. We dig them out of the seedbed by loosening the potting soil under them with a trowel. To prepare the young plants for transplanting, we trim their roots to 1 inch long and trim the top part to 10 inches long.

Our dibble is a 36-inch-long, 1-inch-diameter dowel with the end tapered to a spatulate tip. We sometimes attach a shovel handle to the upper end of the dowel and add a 6-inch-diameter plate 9 inches above the tip. In use we push it into the soil to the full 9-inch depth and then twist the handle so the spatulate tip flattens out the bottom of a 9-inch-deep tubular hole. This is more successful if the soil is moist, as dry soil will tend to collapse back into the hole when the dibble is removed. Thus, we water the surface before transplanting when conditions are dry. We make a hole every four inches along the row and simply drop a leek transplant vertically into each hole.

Once the seedlings are in the holes, only an inch or so of green top sticks up above the soil. Then we irrigate the field and let the leeks grow. We don’t intentionally refill the holes, but soil slowly migrates in every time we irrigate or cultivate. The leek plants grow beautifully, each with a guaranteed nine inches of blanched shank. If you have never grown leeks this way before you may find it hard to believe that it will work—but it does.

Our restaurant customers love early baby leeks. These we grow in a cold greenhouse at five rows to a 30-inch bed, setting them 3 inches apart in the row. At that spacing they can be cultivated with the long-handled wire weeder. Once when we had no other space, we planted single rows of leeks between the edge bed and the wall of the greenhouse. The dibble-and-drop method is the only way we could have done that.

Mâche

Mâche continues growing right through the winter, no matter how cold the weather. With mâche you harvest and sell the whole plants. We often included mâche in the salad mix during

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