Praise for The Winter Harvest Handbook

“How do you produce first-rate food all year-round in northern places? This is the big question facing the local food movement, and Eliot Coleman, one of America’s most innovative farmers, has come up with excellent answers. Brimming with ingenuity, hope, and eminently practical advice, The Winter Harvest Handbook is an indispensable contribution.”

—MICHAEL POLLAN, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food

“I just finished picking my first carrots, beets, and radishes from my new ‘cold house’ in Bedford, New York. It is so rewarding to harvest fresh vegetables and salads in the middle of winter and I grow them following the techniques of Eliot Coleman. I have been a devotee of Eliot’s for years, fully agreeing with his methods for growing in winter, spring, summer, and fall, tasty, nutritious produce with a minimum consumption of fossil fuels. Congratulations on another volume of useful, practical, sensible, and enlightening information.”

—MARTHA STEWART, best-selling author, magazine publisher,
and Emmy Award-winning television producer and host

“Eliot Coleman’s books have been called Bibles for small farmers and home gardeners. I suspect that’s because he writes about not just gardening but about everything that connects to good food and pleasure; a Renaissance man for a new generation, he’ll quote Goethe in the same breath as Ghandi, and as a result, you’ll dig, weed, eat, think, and live more fully.”

—DAN BARBER, Chef, Blue Hill and Blue Hill Stone Barns

“If we are going to create a good, clean, fair food system, we’ve got to learn how to grow affordable, local food year-round and make a living at it. Eliot Coleman knows more about this than anyone I’ve met. Here he gives the detailed information needed to make it work. The only way to learn it better would be to follow him around for a few seasons.”

—JOSHUA VIERTEL, President, Slow Food USA

“‘Attention to detail is the major secret to success in any endeavor,’ writes Eliot Coleman in this absorbing and happily detailed report on his ongoing efforts to grow flawless vegetables without hothouses on the frozen ‘back side’ of the year. In chapters covering everything from The Yearly Schedule and Greenhouse Design to Weed Control and Marketing, Coleman tracks his own constant search for perfection, a quality that has led more than one young farmer to exclaim ‘I’d follow him anywhere.’ Well worth reading even if you don’t grow vegetables, just to watch a master’s mind at work.”

—JOAN DYE GUSSOW, author of This Organic Life

“The Winter Harvest Handbook is a treasure trove of practical, proven techniques for producing crops on a year-round basis in any climate. Based on decades of on-farm research, this book is packed with useful ideas, tips and practices that anyone can use in pursuing the increasingly vital dream of local, organic food production using a minimum of precious resources. A masterful book from a master organic farmer. I wish I had had a copy 35 years ago!”

—AMIGO BOB CANTISANO, President, Organic Ag Advisors

“Eliot Coleman is widely recognized as the ‘master’ of the master gardeners. His new book, The Winter Harvest Handbook—which tells us how to produce local food even in winter in cold climates like Maine, without a lot of energy—now joins his other delightful books as another lovely read, packed with powerful and practical ideas that every gardener will treasure.”

—FREDERICK KIRSCHENMANN, Distinguished Fellow,
Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, and President
of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture