Veggie season just keeps on growing

Published on Monday, November 23, 2009 by Portland Press Herald (Maine)

Veggie Season Keeps Growing
Demand for locally grown food has farmers building greenhouses and trying cool-weather varieties.
by Beth Quimby

PORTLAND, Maine - The vegetable-growing season used to end with the first hard frost in Maine.

Photograph: Jeff Tarbox picks Tuscan kale in a greenhouse at Sunset Farm Organics in Lyman on Thursday. The farm sells more than 300 pounds of vegetables weekly through the winter to Portland restaurants, at a farmers market in Brunswick and through a community-supported agriculture program. 9Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer)Not anymore.

An increasing number of farmers are pushing the growing season into the winter to take advantage of the surging demand for locally grown food. As a result, more farmers are operating greenhouses, branching out into cool-weather crops and creating new markets for their produce.

"Basically, people have gotten into it because their infrastructure is already there," said Mark Hutton, vegetable specialist and assistant professor of vegetable crops with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension.

Winter farming was pioneered in the 1990s by organic farmer and writer Eliot Coleman and his wife, Barbara Damrosch, at their Four Season Farm in Harborside. The two took a trip to Europe in 1996, following the 44th parallel through France and Italy - the same latitude as Maine - when the idea of winter farming hit Coleman.

"The whole time, we had seen gardens in January with Brussels sprouts and leeks, and the minute we got above the snow line there was nothing," said Coleman.

Coleman said he realized there was plenty of sunlight in Maine during the winter to grow vegetables - he just had to modify the temperature. So he came up with the idea of layered greenhouse structures that require minimal or no heating.

While there are no recent statistics on how many Maine farmers are venturing into winter gardening, agricultural experts say the number of new winter farmers markets and winter community-supported agricultural ventures reflects the increase.

There are about 18 community-supported agricultural operations selling winter shares of organic crops raised on Maine farms, according to the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. The organization has seen its list of winter farmers markets more than double in the past year to more than a dozen across the state.

Other farmers markets are extending their seasons, including the Portland Farmers Market in Monument Square, which is staying open a month later than in past years.

Just why winter farming was not widely practiced before is a bit of a mystery.

Coleman said it could be that people simply assumed vegetables wouldn't grow when there is snow on the ground.

Hutton attributes the practice's growth to the advent of the locally grown movement in reaction to the rise of global corporate marketing, creating a demand that farmers are now rushing to fill.

Paul Lorrain, who raises lettuce and other vegetables in the winter at Sunset Farm Organics in Lyman, said it probably was just that vegetable farmers burned out in the summer and needed the winter to recuperate."

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