What This Book is About

I wrote this book for home gardeners living in the maritime Northwest who would like to have more fresh vegetables in their gardens during the winter months and for teachers who are introducing gardening to their classes. It will be especially useful to those who, having learned their gardening in a continental climate, are not aware of the possibilities of a maritime climate and hence close up their gardens from October until May. Even people who have grown up here and already garden in this mild environment may appreciate a reminder of the many winter varieties and good seed sources available to them.

This book is about vegetable and herb varieties that regularly come a crop between October and May. These are often termed cool-season or cool-weather crops. They are not sown in the winter, but harvested then. While some sowings and plantings can be made as early as February and March or as late as October, most are done from April through September.

If you think about this for a bit, you will see that growing winter crops means that you turn from a summer gardener into a year-round gardener (a lot more work, by the way!). I suppose I really should have written a book about year-round gardening, but if I had done that, I would have had to devote space to tomatoes and cucumbers, when it is the cool-season crops that need to be discussed. Also, you might have missed the point: in this climate, you don’t have to be without vegetables in the fall, winter and early spring if you use suitable varieties, observe the right sowing dates, understand the principles of cool-season production and experiment for yourself!