Cool Season Gardener: Extend the Harvest, Plan Ahead, and Grow Vegetables Year-Round

How would you like to serve your own carrots for Thanksgiving, or fresh-from-the-garden salad at the winter solstice? Or how about collards for Christmas, leeks on New Year's, and lovely red beets for Valentine's Day, all right from your own garden? You can, without much trouble, by practicing winter, or cool-season gardening.

Cool Season Gardener is longtime garden writer Bill Thorness's friendly guide to maintaining your garden year-round in mild maritime climates. He shows you how to keep the garden in production in the colder months, practice succession planning for sowing and transplanting, plant cover crops, and much more.

Season extension techniques are given full attention, with many techniques described for using floating row cover, raised beds, cloches, cold frames, hot caps--even polytunnels and greenhouses. The book includes step-by-step, illustrated DIY building projects to help you easily build your own cloches, cold frames, and trellises. It also shows and tells you how to make the most of recycled materials in the garden.

Useful charts in the book:

• Vegetable varieties for cool-season gardening, including sowing and growing temperatures, days to maturity and what season extension techniques work best
• What to grow when in Bill's "Seven Seasons of Veggies"
• Floating row cover specs and sources
• Sizing a hoop house
• Plastic sheeting specs and sources for larger cloches
• Fertilizers and soil nutrients
• Fall cover crop types and planting dates

Even avid gardeners might be surprised to learn all the benefits of cool season gardening--the fact that it is often less work than summer gardening due to slower growth and less frequent need for maintenance, or the seasonal bonus of having fewer pests. Not to mention that year-round gardening will help you run a more sustainable household, while at the same time yielding fresh, homegrown produce on your table every month of the year.