Book Review: Eliot Coleman’s Four-Season Harvest

Updated: November 28, 2020

Maybe it is because I grew up in Maine that I find Eliot Coleman’s book Four-Season Harvest so astonishing. Coleman’s farm is located in down east Maine, more than 150 miles north of where I grew up.

As a boy, I don’t remember ANYONE even considering gardening past September, even though the weather in my hometown may be a little warmer than where Coleman is located.

When I was growing up in Maine, all the gardens were long gone by Halloween.

As a result, a lot of gardeners were very sad when the mercury started to drop. Many found them selves wanting more.

Let’s take a sec to get the legal words out of the way. This article may contain affiliate links. That means if you click and buy from my partners, I will make a tiny amount of money at no cost to you. This in no way affects my recommendations.

Low-cost tunnel greenhouses work so well that if the public were more familiar with them, I think every gardening family would have one.

— Eliot Coleman

If you’re one of those gardeners with a desire to garden longer and more successfully, you should put Four-Season Harvest on your reading list. It will be even more helpful than Coleman’s newer Winter Harvest Handbook.

Easy, not complex gardening

Unlike Winter Harvest Handbook, Four-Season Harvest is more oriented toward the backyard gardener. It shows you various methods for producing food throughout the year, but the emphasis is on making things easier.

Coleman recognizes that growing food year round must seem like a daunting task to the everyday gardener.

There’s a number of places where, as a self-described vegetable “loony,” he discusses more complex and effective methods. But in the end, he recommends simpler and easier ways of doing things.

But like Winter Harvest Handbook, the central theme of Four-Season Harvest makes the case that we should be growing the same vegetables as other places with the same latitude and day length.

Coleman shows that, in the colder months, he can grow the same vegetables in Maine as gardeners are growing in the much warmer South of France.  

He accomplishes this by using unheated hoop houses, cold frames and row covers. According to Coleman, the protective layer provided by these tools is like putting on a windbreaker. It helps bring the Maine climate closer to the naturally milder conditions that you would find in southern France.

In fact, he says, “Low-cost tunnel greenhouses work so well that if the public were more familiar with them, I think every gardening family would have one.”

Mistakes are not a problem

Coleman’s gardening philosophy is a forgiving one. Mistakes are easily corrected because of year round succession planting. If something doesn’t work out,

“Take a hoe and rake, clean off the area and replant it with whatever crop comes next in the sequence,” says Coleman. Gone is the fear of mistakes. The short growing season no longer restricts you to one chance to get it right.

I’m going to make some changes to my gardening plans based on what I’ve learned from Four-Season Harvest.

For one thing, I’m going to severely limit the number of leaves I put in my compost piles “because they mat together and create an airless condition. Leaf decomposition takes place primarily through the action of fungi rather than bacteria. Thus, it seems to work better if leaves are piled separately.”

There is much more in Four-Season Harvest than just using hoop houses to extend the gardening season. He also looks at other ways to garden in the cold of winter.

For example, he forces root crops like Belgium endive, beets and parsley to spout inside so that you can eat their young, tender leaves.

All in all, any gardener interested in extending the growing season will be interested in this book.

Related articles that might interest you:

1. Book Review: Eliot Coleman’s Handbook
2. A Hoop House is a Tomato Growing Machine
3. Grow a Million Cucumbers in a Hoop House

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