The New Organic Grower

Practical

The book covers, in sequence:

• Land selection and design — siting, soil assessment, layout, tool-shed and packing-shed planning.
• Permanent raised beds — the standard 30-inch bed width Coleman codified, the path-and-bed permanent system, the choice not to till between cash crops.
• [[crop-rotation|Crop rotation]] — eight-year rotations integrating heavy feeders, heavy givers, light feeders, and root crops with cover-crop sequences.
• Soil amendment — composts, mineral inputs, on-farm-produced amendments.
• [[seedling-propagation|Seed-starting]] and transplanting — [[soil|the soil]]-block system Coleman codified (instead of plastic plug trays), the timing-and-temperature management for cold-climate transplant production.
• Tool selection — the wheel hoe, the broadfork, the precision seeder, the hand-tools-not-tractor approach for under-5-acre operations.
• Pest and weed management — biological-balance-based, cultivation-and-rotation-based, with chemical-input tools as last resort.
• Marketing — the direct-market vegetable economics, CSA, restaurant sales, [[farmers-market|farmers’ market]].

The book’s distinguishing feature is profitability emphasis. Coleman is explicit: small-scale organic vegetable production must work as a business or it cannot persist. The system he describes is calibrated for one or two people to make a working living from one to two acres.

Cultural

Coleman, working from Four Season Farm in Maine, demonstrated through the 1970s, 80s, and 90s that year-round vegetable production is possible at high latitudes through unheated greenhouse extension (movable hoophouses, double-cover row cover, succession-planted cold-hardy varieties). His follow-on book The Winter Harvest Handbook (2009) is the canonical reference for cold-climate winter production.

The lineage that runs through Coleman: he learned from Helen and Scott Nearing (who had homesteaded just up the Maine coast at Forest Farm), studied European biointensive farming traditions, refined the small-bed-system through Four Season Farm, then taught a generation of farmers through workshops, books, and personal apprenticeships. Jean-Martin Fortier (Quebec), Ben Hartman (Indiana), [[joel-salatin|Joel Salatin]]‘s vegetable extensions, the entire MOFGA-NOFA-and-related-network: all carry the Coleman tradition forward.

Lenses still to grow

• Helen and Scott Nearing, the Maine homesteading tradition Coleman emerged from
• The European biointensive lineage (Jean-Martin Fortier’s predecessors, Alan Chadwick’s Biodynamic-French intensive)
• The Winter Harvest Handbook and the cold-climate four-season production system
• Specific Coleman-developed tools (the broadfork as Coleman’s tool, soil blockers, the wide-grid [[cucumber|cucumber]] trellis)

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Enables: [[market-gardener]]
• Shares approach with: [[the-soul-of-soil]]
• Member of: [[book]]
• Pioneer of: [[market-gardening]]
• Featured in: [[johnnys-selected-seeds]]

Sources

• Coleman, The New Organic Grower (3rd ed., Chelsea Green, 2018; 1st ed. 1989)
• Coleman, The Winter Harvest Handbook (Chelsea Green, 2009)
• Coleman, The [[four-season-harvest|Four Season Harvest]] (Chelsea Green, 1992)
• Acres USA archive of Coleman articles
• Jean-Martin Fortier, [[the-market|The Market]] Gardener (2014) — direct intellectual descent

Rooted in life.