Customer Reviews

Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long

5 star:		(59)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Eat fresh, home-grown vegetables year round? Eliminate canning and freezing? Do this all at low cost? Eliot Coleman does, you can, too, and here is the how. Coleman is a market gardener in Maine who may eat better than Bill Gates. He shows that sunlight and wind protection are more important that temperature--and, by the way, most of the U.S. gets more winter sunlight than Coleman's place. Inexpensive, unheated greenhouses that he calls tall tunnel houses--some say hoop houses--and cold frames protect from wind and keep snow off the veggies. Greenhouse comfort is more to benefit the gardener. The key is what and when to plant. Full info given for planting dates, construction details, sources of seeds, tools, greenhouses. Well illustrated. An essential guide for organic gourmands.

Eliot Coleman's love and deep knowledge of gardening comes through in this easy to read, and easy to use book. I love the idea of a four season harvest, and if he can do it in Maine, then anyone can do it! The book opens the readers mind to the wide spread possibilities that await gardener's with imagination, an open mind, and the willingness to work at it. He offers ideas for cold frames, row covers and tunnels to extend the season. Good explanations as to how they protect crops. The book also gives a great amount of detail for a wide range of vegetables. Charts provide information on when vegetables can be harvested throughout the year, and offers the reader many vegetables to choose from for a three season harvest, and a fair number for the four season harvest. I would recommend this book to anyone, beginner or experienced gardener!

Coleman is an experienced organic gardener and has written previous books on organic gardening. Whether you are looking for new organic gardening techniques or ways to improve a self-sustaining lifestyle, Coleman's book will be a valuable resource. He explains how to grow delicious, organically-grown vegetables from your home garden year 'round. Organically-grown vegetables can be harvested throughout the coldest months in all climate zones in the Lower 48 without much extra effort or time. He shows how to design inexpensive, simple cold frames and unheated mobile greenhouses. He explains how to use them along with a root cellar to grow a variety of organic vegetables each suited to their season. Success depends on growing a large variety of vegetables each suited to their season, and in cold frames, mobile greenhouses, and root cellars. Coleman's book will surely guide the grower to extend the growing season!

I've built a few cold frames in north-eastern Massachusetts based on all the latest theories of maximizing and storing solar heat. They didn't work so well. Then I tried Eliott's simple cold-frame design and it was in every way superior! He's not making stuff up to sell a book, this is time-tested and personally tested advice from a master grower. This, and "The New Organic Grower" were my favorite books before I moved South.

I'd wanted this book for a year, and it lived up to the anticipation for a number of reasons. First, there is great detail, so much that you gotta fight off being overwhelmed. This will clearly be a great reference book for many years to come. Second, this isn't some new invention in farming... it's something I value even more, the careful collection of old-wisdom and a retraining those of us who have been cut off from the ways of yore. In this case, the author researches growing methods in France and shows us how folk who rely on garden food have long found ways to grow it more effectively.

Cool stuff. Makes me more enthusiastic about winter gardening... and about eating more whole foods.

This book is the only one of it's kind I have found. Not only does it have step-by-step instructions and tables on when and how to plant and harvest, it also has plans for building your own cold frames and a portable greenhouse (hoop house). Many books on the same subject focus on artificially heating a greenhouse to grow warm-weather vegetables. This one does not! The focus is instead on how to use what is naturally cold tolerant, and how to keep your plants harvestable throughout the winter.

It is probably not easy writing a second book on a similar subject.I read and reviewed Eliot Coleman's first book on Organic Gardening.And as you can read in that first review,I just loved that book.The second book,I would have called "Cold Hardy Winter Vegetables",rather than the Four-Season Harvest.
Of course there is a list for growing vegetables all year round.But apart from the list what one can grow during the colder season,it is just pretty much a recapitulation of the first work Coleman put on paper.
So I still give this book 4 Stars.Because if you have not read his first one,then of course it would be a great book.

When first reading this book, I got really excited about the prospects of greenhouse growing in Michigan during the winter. That is until someone reminded me how cloudy MI is during the winter...so I did some research, and sure enough, the part of Maine the author lives in has *more* sunny days than the US average in winter, whereas Michigan is among the cloudiest of all areas, with a number of sunny days far below the national average. It's still a good book, but I think the author should've made as much a point of cloud cover as he did latitude and day length.

After joining a farmer's market, this book/author was mentioned several times in conversation with other growers. Since we had recently "retired" to upstate NY, I thought it might be a good thing to see how someone else turned a negative to a positive(such as our frozen north). The result- with the help of my 81 year old friend we are building a hoop house (or 2)instead of the green house I originally desired. Simple and useful-sums the book up best!

I love this book! I recently checked this out from the library, to try it out before I buy, and now I know that it's definitely a book to add to my collection. I am going to be starting a garden in the spring, and I was becoming overwhelmed with all of the information out there, but once I started reading Four Season Harvest, I realized that it won't be as complicated as I thought and I was able to relax a little. With all of the thorough and easy to understand information he gives, his system (and his results) sounds like it would be easy to reproduce in anybody's garden. I especially like his mobile greenhouse plans and I am planning on implementing them once I get my garden established. I appreciate the fact that not only does he give recommendations on how to use coldframes and greenhouses, but he also gives suggestions on how to build simple versions, which is great for someone like me who does not already have plans for building those things.

I would also recommend Coleman's book The New Organic Grower. Although it is more geared towards market growers, it has a lot of great information that is also useful for home gardeners.