Coastal Maine is just awakening from winter in mid-May. The scent of crab apple blossoms and lilacs mixes with a salt smell in the air. In little towns along my route, nearly every yard has a rectangle of freshly tilled soil ready for planting.
But on this winding road along Penobscot Bay, it’s the end of the growing season for Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch. They’ve been harvesting fresh produce—salad greens, carrots, turnips, radishes—all through the harshest winter weather that New England could throw at them. That seems remarkable enough. Then consider they’ve done it mostly without supplemental heat.
“We’re the backwards farmers, working from October to May,” Coleman says, as he greets me at the gate to their shingled house. He has just returned from delivering boxes of specialty salad mix to their dozen or so customers—places like the Blue Hill Food Co-op, the Castine Inn, even the corner store. His chinos are dusty. His gray hair is a bit too long, marking him as a child of the Sixties.
Of course, Coleman is not just a farmer, backwards or otherwise. He is one of this country’s leading advocates of organic farming, and he has been promoting locally grown food and experimenting with organic and season-extending growing techniques for the past 30 years. Hunt through any organic farmer’s bookcase and chances are good that you’ll find a dog-eared, mud-splattered copy of at least one of Coleman’s books—maybe Four-Season Harvest or The New Organic Grower—all brimming with his strong opinions (“The peddlers of chemical fertilizers appreciate the sales potential of products that need to be applied frequently”; “Genetic engineering is just a series of mistakes, and we’re not going to recognize them until 20 years from now”).
But Coleman doesn’t just preach; he’s proved that organic farming can move beyond the realm of boutique hobbyists—and that there are profits to be made as well. He is the Steve Jobs of farming, the man who took organic from the fringe to the mainstream, from the theoretical to the real world.
Coleman and Damrosch realized that it doesn’t matter what you produce if you can’t sell it for profit. In that respect, the pair are ruthless. They try to make each crop pay its way, shooting for a return of at least $5 per square foot of greenhouse space.
When you first meet Coleman and Damrosch, however, you’d never guess that they would be so business-minded. The house at Four Season Farm is surrounded by gardens. There’s a quince blooming in the dooryard. Bright tulips dominate the huge undulating perennial border that Damrosch created. There’s a plastic-covered greenhouse attached to the main house. That’s where the couple refined their remarkable four-season harvest system, and today it’s empty.
As we head away from the house along a muddy path, lined with ferns, foxtails, and brambles, that runs through a stand of spruce and birch, the two want to talk politics. Food politics.
“The way you make money in agriculture is the same way you make it anywhere else—with quantity,” Coleman says. “But the minute you start treating food as an industrial, commercial product, you lose quality. And you lose any incentive for the small grower to figure out how to farm practically for himself.”
On cue, we emerge from the woods into a clearing dominated by three large plastic-covered greenhouses—the farm. Coleman throws open the door to the nearest greenhouse, and we’re surrounded by the scent of plants exhaling. Suddenly it’s not spring in New England anymore. We’re in some mythical place at some impossible time where the crops are always perfect. Here, there are beds jammed full of greens: four varieties of lettuce, a miniature curly endive, Bull’s Blood beet leaves, arugula, spinach, minutina, claytonia. And meatier crops, too: radishes, turnips, celery, even potatoes.
This way of farming not only works, Coleman says, but results in produce that is exceptional for its level of quality.” He points to a bed thick with turnip greens. “Those are pretty damn nice-looking,” he says. He’s right. Then he pulls a turnip from the loose soil and passes it to me for a taste. It’s crisp, sweet, and earthy. I have to remind myself that it is, indeed, a turnip.
“It’s simple,” says Coleman. “Plants are determined to grow. We followed Buckminster Fuller’s advice: ‘Don’t fight forces, use them.’ So we said to ourselves, ‘It’s cold here, so let’s see what likes cold.’ ”
Actually, there’s a bit more to it than that. The couple start cold-hardy crops in outdoor beds in the autumn, pull the movable greenhouses over them in late fall, add a second layer of protection by covering the crops with plastic row covers, and harvest regularly to keep the crops small.
In reality, it’s taken the two farmers ten years of 16-hour days, planting and harvesting on their hands and knees; countless hours in libraries researching obscure reports; and even a trip along the 44th parallel in France and Italy (the same latitude as their farm) to see what market gardeners were growing as winter crops there.
Coleman was raised in New Jersey, Damrosch in Manhattan. She grew up in a gardening family and eventually moved to Connecticut with the idea of farming but started a landscape design business instead. She also wrote books on gardening, including The Garden Primer, a 12-year-old guide to basic techniques. He had no gardening experience and ended up a teacher of literature. In his late twenties, Coleman became captivated by Living the Good Life, Helen and Scott Nearing’s classic account of farming and simple living in Vermont.
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