simple season extension strategies
easy strategies for stretching your growing season
Nearly every serious gardener in a cold climate eventually looks to extend their growing season, either to begin earlier in the spring, or to grow longer into the autumn. Cold frames and row covers are the two most common methods for protecting your crops before late frost in the spring and after early frost in the autumn. Materials for these simple structures are available in most lumber yards, hardware stores, and gardening catalogs.
Niki Jabbour has written a detailed guide to help us understand how to extend our growing season, using both row covers and cold frames. You can view her book "Year-Round Vegetable Gardener" at Amazon.com
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Clara Coleman is a four-season farming consultant, specializing in methods developed by her father, Eliot Coleman, at Four Season Farm in Maine. Many of Eliot's invented tools, as well as all things row cover and movable hoop- houses, can be found in Johnny's Seed Catalog and at Rimol Greenhouse Systems.
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Eliot Coleman ~ Four Season Farm in Maine ~ His classic book on simple winter growing:
The principle concepts described in the book are alarmingly simple – cold hardy veg varieties, a double layer of protection (like a cold frame inside a polytunnel) and cleverly planned successional planting – but the results and glorious colour photos are genuinely inspiring. As with so many stories of success in the brave new world of ecological or 'deep-organic' food production, the breakthrough at Four Season Farm was a realization that working within the limits of nature yielded the best results. For Eliot Coleman, greenhouses ceased to be an expensive bubble of perpetual summer and became a cost effective, elegant creation of a nice mild winter. Or, as he describes it himself, '"'It was like the difference between sitting inside by the fire on a cold day and being outside with enough layers of clothes on to keep you comfortable."
The principle concepts described in the book are alarmingly simple – cold hardy veg varieties, a double layer of protection (like a cold frame inside a polytunnel) and cleverly planned successional planting – but the results and glorious colour photos are genuinely inspiring. As with so many stories of success in the brave new world of ecological or 'deep-organic' food production, the breakthrough at Four Season Farm was a realization that working within the limits of nature yielded the best results. For Eliot Coleman, greenhouses ceased to be an expensive bubble of perpetual summer and became a cost effective, elegant creation of a nice mild winter. Or, as he describes it himself, '"'It was like the difference between sitting inside by the fire on a cold day and being outside with enough layers of clothes on to keep you comfortable."
a slide show gallery of simple season extension strategies: