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For most gardeners , a distinctive season start with planting in the spring and ends with a big harvest in the fall – one that the frugal home - gardener hopes lasts through until spring sprouts again . And if it does n’t , well , then it ’s off to the store to pick up whatever measly , unfresh produce is usable . But it does n’t have to be that mode . With some planning , longanimity , and a small expert advice you could be enjoying a year - round harvest without any total work . Do n’t believe us ? Take it from organic gardening pioneer , Eliot Coleman .
The following is an excerpt fromFour - Season Harvestby Eliot Coleman . It has been adjust for the WWW .
We are long - fourth dimension devotes of four - season nutrient production and , to tell the accuracy , we have n’t been doing too badly making use of both wintertime and summertime sunshine . We do this because we have it off to eat on good food and partake in it with our friends . Our four - season harvest is based on a simple premiss . Whereas thegrowing seasonmay be chiefly limited to the warmer calendar month , theharvest seasonhas no such limits . We enjoy a year - round of drinks harvest by following two practices : succession plantingandcrop protection . chronological sequence plantingmeans sowing veg more than once . Sowings at one- to three - week intervals during the growing season will gallop the fresh harvest home of summer crop for as long as potential . Midsummer to late - summer sowings of hardy harvest begin the transition to the cool months . That is where crop protection take over .
Crop protectionmeans veg under cover . The traditional wintertime vegetables are very hardy . They will exist the ferocious frigidity under a cover of snow . Since we ca n’t consider on Baron Snow of Leicester book binding , we substitute dewy-eyed protective structure such as cold frame and charge plate - get across tunnels . Many delicious winter veg need only this minimal aegis to yield through the winter . All it get are come of some intimate and unfamiliar hardy vegetables , a little crop shelter , and a Cupid’s disease of innovative thinking .
The innovative thought process involves understand thatonlythe harvest - season , andnotthe growing season , needs to be extended . The preeminence is authoritative because the crop season can be carry with cool - weather condition vegetables and simple crop protection . Extending the raise time of year , however , involves adding or call for heat , store hotness , adding insulation to protect that heat , and leave special inflammation for long - day summer crops . Growing - season university extension is extremely technological . Harvest - season elongation is essentially biological . It is also just patently coherent . The harvest is what you eat .
We choose not to define our dim-witted crop protection method as “ unheated , ” because that makes it sound as if we are not doing something — heating — that we should be doing . The understanding our security is unheated is because heating is not necessary . We often forefend the word “ greenhouse ” since many the great unwashed assume that a greenhouse , if unheated , is a super - insulated technological marvel or a complicated heat - storage equipment . Ours is neither . The best shortsighted financial statement to describe our approach to the four - time of year garden is a quotation from Buckminster Fuller in his bookShelter(1932 ): “ Do n’t fight military force ; habituate them . ” Instead of lament the forces of winter and trying to agitate them by adding heat , we have limited our treatment to the climatical shelter provided by one or two semitransparent layers . Instead of essay to develop heat - loving crop during cold weather , we have say , “ So it ’s insensate , great ! What likes moth-eaten ? ” The answer is some thirty or more hardy veggie .
Fighting forcefulness take vigour , and energy costs money . Our approach is to take vantage of everything that a semitransparent layer can get for liberal from the sun and the residual heat of the soil mass . In our judgment , we have create an cheap “ protected microclimate ” and then found the works that will thrive in that microclimate . The same applies in reverse gear during the summer . When those protected microclimates are extra lovesome , we do n’t fight that heat with motorized greenhouse cooling systems . We practice it to grow heat - loving crop .
Fresh harvest all year round makes life story simpler and easier in a number of direction . Since most of the fall , winter , and spring crops are set in midsummer to previous summer in space renounce by summer crops , this system results in yr - circle feeding without class - round gardening . By extending the harvest , you also spread out out the work . All the planting does n’t have to be done at once in the spring , and all the harvest home is n’t crowded into the former summertime .
alternatively of being a series of chores ( putting in the garden , weeding the garden , harvesting , and canning and freeze ) with rather fixed clip frame , home intellectual nourishment production becomes a part of the whole year . The four - season nurseryman does n’t have a date , such as Memorial Day ( traditional in New England ) , to put in the garden . That ’s because there is no goal call “ put in the garden . ” The garden is in all the time . The end is to deplete well .
Is this more time - consume ? Not at all . It is certainly more enjoyable . The four - time of year harvest is a dissimilar placement of time and a dissimilar appreciation of the importance of quality food . It will free you from the chores of solid food preservation and trips to the securities industry . You will always have reinvigorated food in the garden — crisp and delicious . You will have set up a system that features many different vegetable in their respective seasons rather than a modified inclination of veg desirable only for the summer season . The amount of employment comes out about the same over the course of the year . The benefits are that the joy of a fresh harvest continue through all four seasons and the nutrient is more nutritious and wide-ranging .
If this is such a great concept, why isn’t everyone doing it?
One reason could be that in many people ’s nous , the approximation of supply most of their food seems like a large , complicated task outside of their experience . But the true statement is that growing food is the most basic activity of human civilisation , not some mysterious industrial process . You do not need a large - scale operation . Your intellectual nourishment is not give rise in bit and pieces around the year . You are integrating the garden into your sprightliness the same means you incorporate other important activity , such as helping your children with homework , playing catch and talk with them , sharing household chores , and help out the neighbor . You do n’t rent others to do those jobs . You do them yourself because they are meaningful , jubilant , and crucial to your family ’s spiritual welfare . Your intellectual nourishment is of no less grandness .
The telling list of benefit from the four - season harvest is what motivates us to encourage others to give it a attempt . The first welfare isfreshness . dietitian agree tonic is good and nothing is fresher than the home plate garden . All the vitamins and all the savour the food is meant to have are there for you to enjoy . The carrots have crunch , the salad green have crisp , the Spinacia oleracea is full of life . Week - old salads on the garden truck shelf ca n’t equate with those that go from soil to salad roll on the same day . Good chefs recognize this , the rarified onetime - fashioned ones who denounce the farmer ’ markets daily . And gardener knew it long before the chefs .
The next benefit isvariety . We love to eat with the seasons . Just as we have chosen to hold out in a place where spring , summer , fall , and winter are very different from one another , we wish our bill of fare to muse this . Certain penchant and time of year go together — eating raw peas on the first sweaterless day ; roasted maize at a beach picnic ; pumpkin pie on a festive gloam weekend ; chicory escarole and mache salad with roasted Beta vulgaris on a 24-hour interval when you ’re beaming the wood kitchen range is warm . As we have searched for new winter crops , we have been stunned at the riches of choice .
The third welfare isquality . We are not vegetarians , but we eat up a lot of vegetables and salads . They are our favorite foods . We require to know that what we eat on has been grown on exceptional soil nutrify with all the organic matter and mineral plant need . Since the governance bureaucratism has displayed such dismal incompetence protecting us against the dangers of farming chemical , we have decided to make the decisions ourselves . We no longer need to wonder , “ Where has this lettuce been and what have they done to it ? ” Given the telling statistics show the nutritionary grandness of vegetable , we need to get all the minerals , soluble fibre , beta carotin , folic dot , and other positives without any regrets .
The fourth benefit issimplicity . We have been cheerily surprised at how easy it can be to grow fresh winter food . The first footstep was to realise that we are n’t garden in winter , just harvest . All the gardening was done in late summertime and other fall when we planted most of these crop . Furthermore , biology is on our side . The crops that succeed in winter are those that like coolheaded weather . Most fruiting crop such as corn , tomatoes , peppers , cucumber , or eggplants call for the hotness of summertime to do well .
But the majority of the leafy crops require the cool conditions of fall - winter - bound if they are to try good . This is their traditional time of year . Most gardeners know how quickly spinach plant bolts when warm weather condition come . The same is true for other coolheaded - weather greens : arugula is very penetrating - tasting in summertime ; radicchio and other curly endive turn bitter ; mache wo n’t germinate when the land is too warm or day are long . Cold weather brings out the in force in these leafy crops , ca-ca them tenderize and sweet .
lately many of the traditional European cool - season crops , such as mache , radicchio , Belgian endive , arugula , and dandelion , have been discovered by upscale restauranteurs . There is now a demand to have them available all year . How dull . We expect forward to mache and escarole in the wintertime . That is their season , and they are fresh and alive , while corn and bonce are limp specimens on the supermarket produce ledge or ice - encrusted in the store ’s deep-freeze .
Doesn’t this seasonality limit the meals? Not at all.
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Four-Season Harvest
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