I’ve seen this book on and off ever since I was bitten by the gardening bug five or six years ago.  I would see it advertised in catalogs, or on Amazon, but never got around to reading it.  During one of our recent trips to the library, I happened to see it on the shelf, so I brought it home.  And I got sucked right in.

Four-Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman

This book is changing the way I’m thinking about gardening completely.  I have always heard that using cold frames and tunnels and greenhouses was a way to extend the gardening season, but no one every really explained to me exactly how to do it- or how it works.  This book explains, in detail, exactly how you utilize a cold frame to extend your season.  And then he goes a step further and tells you what crops he’s had success with as well.

I guess I always assumed that a cold frame was a way to grow from seed throughout the winter.  I had no idea how it actually worked.  Instead, what you do is plant your seeds in early August into your coldframe spot.  The seeds germinate and grow, and just as they get to the point where they would normally bolt and go to seed in the summer, the weather gets cold, you pop your cold frame on, and the plants go into a kind of dormancy.  They stop growing, so there is no danger of bolting, and they live in a suspended animation until the point where it gets just too cold- even with the cold frame.  Even if the plants freeze overnight, Mr. Coleman says that the coldframe will warm up the box to reinvigorate the greens within, so that a harvest later in the day is entirely possible.

I’m psyched.  I’m beyond psyched.  As I’ve been planning out my garden beds, I have already decided that two of the smaller ones will be home to cold frames.  Andy already has storm windows hiding around somewhere just waiting to be used for this purpose.  Can you imagine?  Walking out to the cold frame to harvest some greens and leeks for an amazing Christmas Day salad?  It’s entirely possible.

I was so excited with this book that I immediately reserved his newer book, The Winter Harvest Handbook at the library.   As soon as I got it, I devoured it, but I’ll confess to being a little disappointed with it.  Oh, it was great, but, it really is written for those who are thinking about using greenhouses to extend the harvest.  By using both greenhouses and coldframes, they have managed to have a successful harvest year-round.  It’s an exciting prospect, to be sure, but living in the city here, I don’t think we’ll be assembling dozens of greenhouses on our lawn.  The neighbors might not care so much for that.  And yet, I did glean bits from this book as well.  So many bits, that I took a look at our screen porch, which is currently covered in plastic, and realized that I already had my own sort-of greenhouse.   I promptly headed to the local garden center and picked up several packets of different mesclun mixes and sowed a flat of salad greens.  They are sprouting under lights right now, but in the days ahead, I intend to get a thermometer out in that screen porch and grow me some winter salad.  I have visions of a mid- March harvest of delicious home-grown salad greens.

In the next few weeks I’ll share how I’m changing my garden planning.  I’m carefully planning planting dates for everything- including the planting of the cold frame beds.  I’m planning for multiple sowings of other things, and that’s the first step.  Once I get timing planned, then I’m going to need to go through the planned beds, and make notes about what goes where.  And then I have to stick to that plan.  Gardening is officially underway, and it’s going to be an awesome year.   And as soon as Andy gets back to work full-time,  Year-Round Harvest is going to find a permanent home on my bookshelf.  It’s the book that is going to revolutionize how I garden almost as much as the Square Foot Gardening method has.