Salad in a Maine winter

In 1968, Eliot Coleman bought land in Maine from Scott and Helen Nearing, two of the best-known names of the back-to-the-land movement, and started farming.

Maine is not an easy place to grow food. The winters are long, dark and cold. Coleman's life's work became a question few farmers there were asking: what if you kept harvesting anyway?

The answer he and his wife, Barbara Damrosch, worked out at Four Season Farm in Harborside, where they farmed together from 1991, had nothing magic about it. He put it in one sentence:

The winter harvest, as we practice it at Four Season Farm, has three components: cold-hardy vegetables, succession planting, and protected cultivation.

Eliot Coleman, The Winter Harvest Handbook (2009)

In practice that means choosing crops that can take the cold, planting them early enough that they're grown before the darkest weeks, and sheltering them in simple unheated greenhouses, sometimes with another layer of cover inside. In deep winter the plants barely grow. But they wait, fresh, to be picked.

He wrote it all down so anyone could do it: The New Organic Grower in 1989, Four-Season Harvest in 1992, The Winter Harvest Handbook in 2009. In December 2024 he and Barbara leased the farm to Molly Friedland and Caleb Hawkins, who carry the work on.

Why bother

In Four-Season Harvest he gave the simplest reason there is:

We do this because we love to eat good food and share it with our friends.

Eliot Coleman, Four-Season Harvest