Book Review: The Four Season Harvest

It's been a while since my last book review, but I have not been hurting for books. Can't.stop.reading!

Anyway, after hearing wonderful things about The Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman (Chelsea Green, 1999), I finally checked it out from my local library.

I was a little concerned about the fact that this book was written by someone who lives in Maine.

In case you have been dead to the world, I live in California [pronounced Kahl e FOR neee yaaa, per Schwarzenegger] and we're about as opposite in weather as states can get. But I also enjoyed The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward C. Smith, and he is in Maine. There was some reviews of this book on Amazon that also turned me off for some reason. They certainly shouldn't have.

We got some really, and I do mean really great advice from this book.

After reading Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway, this book was a natural progression for us. We've been using techniques from Gaia's Garden in planning our gardens, and was a big reason we sheet mulched the backyard (water conservation, worm habitat, and dense plantings of diverse plants that shade the soil to come). I guess I ought to get around to reviewing that book as well, huh?

The dense planting technique from Gaia's Garden used in context with this book shows you that all you have to do to have loads of great winter vegetables is plant them in the late summer and into fall (this varies depending on where you live), and give them protection based on how cold it gets in your neck of the woods. For us, that usually means nothing more than low tunnels (we built the raised beds with hollow 4" x 4" posts for the sole purpose of running tubing through them and draping frost blankets over them in the winter. Perhaps we'll actually do that next year!). For colder areas of the country, cold frame and green houses may be more appropriate.

I liked The Four Season Harvest because like Gaia's Garden, there is no such thing as "putting the garden to bed." I can't tell you how depressing it is right now in April to not be able to garden all that much because I'm waiting to be able to plant things out (it's been obscenely cold for April here - but any day now we should be 98% in the clear). Chris and I didn't plan real well in the fall, which is when most things are supposed to be planted here.

NorCal Tidbit
Most things that folks plant in the spring and harvest in the late summer/fall in cooler climates MUST be planted in fall here in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley in Northern California. Our springs get very warm very quickly (spring becomes summer in one week flat many years), and our springs acts more like other folks' summers. Our summers can reach 110^o+ in a bad year as well.

The most interesting discussion of the book was about a little green named mache. Chris and I planted this a few months back, and it HATES the hot weather (we're having it all for dinner in the next few days before it bolts). BUT it is the most COLD-TOLERANT green, and apparently it is even tastier after cold weather has set in. I've taken some of the leaves off of our mache plants and nibbled them, and they are delicious (this coming from "not really a salad lover" of a person like me. For the record, I NEVER ate vegetables until I met Chris. I'm convinced it is why I am so short to this day).

It's becoming more difficult to find books about gardening that aren't repetitive for me. Everyone tends to kind of say the same thing. This book was a breath of fresh air because it gave us lots of new information to chew on. (Or maybe it was just packaged in a way I hadn't seen it before). I especially enjoyed the talk about summer and winter crops, bed preparation for both and specific plants (this was new), climate resources appendix in the back (maps of the US and Europe with varying information, and dates to plant items based on your first frost date), and although there wasn't many pictures but instead lots of small drawings, Eliot Coleman does a fantastic job of explaining things in a way that everyone can understand.

Cons: None. Great book, start to finish.

This is definitely a book I would love to have in my library. Hopefully someday during our weekly Farmer's Market-Used Book Store trek, I'll come across it and pick it up.

Grade: A+