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Growing Food in a Short Season: Sustainable, Organic Cold-Climate Gardening

In Growing Food in a Short Season, Melanie J. Watts explains that with the right gardening practices the short northern summer can lead to an explosion of life, producing enough color and food to see anyone through the dark days of winter. Providing helpful hints and a wise gardening philosophy for a productive food garden, Watts begins at ground level with instruction on how to use compost and manure to create fertile soil that will lend its life to plants. A variety of seed options and planting methods are presented — including start times and placement — taking into account microclimates that occur in each garden as well as the benefits of companion planting. Additionally, plants that are easily grown in zones two and three are listed with concise how-to-grow information. Watts provides full chapters on garden maintenance and harvesting, as well as tips on cooking and preserving the bounty with great recipes that focus on eating seasonally.

Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long, 2nd Edition

If you love the joys of eating home-garden vegetables but always thought those joys had to stop at the end of summer, this book is for you. Eliot Coleman introduces the surprising fact that most of the United States has more winter sunshine than the south of France. He shows how North American gardeners can successfully use that sun to raise a wide variety of traditional winter vegetables in backyard cold frames and plastic covered tunnel greenhouses without supplementary heat. Coleman expands upon his own experiences with new ideas learned on a winter-vegetable pilgrimage across the ocean to the acknowledged kingdom of vegetable cuisine, the southern part of France, which lies on the 44th parallel, the same latitude as his farm in Maine. This story of sunshine, weather patterns, old limitations and expectations, and new realities is delightfully innovative in the best gardening tradition. Four-Season Harvest will have you feasting on fresh produce from your garden all through the winter. To learn more about the possibility of a four-season farm, please visit Coleman’s website www.fourseasonfarm.com.