What if the most fertile, resilient garden is one that feeds itself? Legendary organic grower Eliot Coleman returns to the podcast this week to challenge the idea that gardeners need to buy fertility in a bag. Drawing on decades of experience at Four Season Farm, Eliot explains how green manure and living soil can provide everything your garden needs — without importing soil inputs that could be inferior or, worse, contaminated.
Eliot is retired from his Four Season Farm near Harborside, Maine, with his wife, Barbara Damrosch — who is a gardening icon in her own right. They continue to garden for their personal benefit, and together they grow produce all year — even during the frigid winters of zone 5. Eliot has authored several books on organic growing and season extension, and his latest is “The Self-Fed Farm and Garden: A Return to the Roots of the Organic Method.”
The “Growing a Greener World” crew and I visited Eliot Coleman and his wife, Barbara Damrosch, at Four Season Farm for an episode we filmed featuring their winter farming operation. They are now retired but continue to live there while leasing out the land to other farmers.
“This was something I had long wanted to write because I was concerned about the quality of crops that people are producing with either CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) manure or municipal waste manure,” Eliot says of his new book. “Just because it’s organic matter doesn’t mean it’s good and pure.”
He writes in “The Self-Fed Farm and Garden” that “The self-fed organic farm avoids the accidental introduction of outside industrial contaminants, which is a perpetual risk to the purity and integrity of an independent system.”
You Can Feed Your Garden for Free
In Eliot’s younger days, when he browsed many organic gardening magazines geared toward home gardeners, he noticed that the advertisements would often be for organic fertilizer. It got Eliot wondering why gardeners would purchase things when they could use local inputs that they can collect or grow for free.
“Back when we started, store-bought inputs like soybean meal and everything were pretty expensive,” Eliot recalls. “And we had no money. We were the most poverty stricken beginning farmers I know of. And not only that, we didn’t really have any farmland because the land I’d started on we cleared from spruce fir forest. And we were still grubbing out stumps and pulling out roots and everything. So the idea of using what was available locally was very appealing. And one thing that was easily available locally was mowing of old, abandoned hay fields.”
Many old farms in their area were owned by summer residents who did not actively cultivate the land. The summer folks would hire contractors to mow their fields once a year.
“I’m a smart boy,” Eliot says. “Whenever I chatted with them, I would mention how dangerous it was to leave all of that flammable dry hay around their house — and would they mind if I came in and picked it up? They didn’t mind at all.”
Eliot composted the hay by wetting it down and adding a little powdered clay.
“That was the beginning of realizing that you could make soil with stuff that you didn’t have to buy, if you put your mind to it,” he says.
Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch’s Four Season Farm.
Photo Courtesy of Eliot Coleman
Why Green Manure Is the Best Source of Free Soil Inputs
As he gained experience as an organic farmer, Eliot realized that the best source of free soil inputs is green manure — another term for cover crops that enrich soil when they are turned in. Eliot refers to them in his book as “soil fertilizing crops.”
If he needs more nitrogen in the soil, he grows a leguminous green manure. If all he needs is bulk organic matter, he grows rye and vetch over winter.
“The reason organic farming works is the soil is alive,” Eliot says. “It’s really alive. There are more alive creatures in just a handful of fertile soil than there are human beings on the planet. I mean, it’s an amazing thing. And so, if you till all that into the surface of the soil where all the microorganisms and other creatures can help break it down — bingo — you have fertility for next year’s crops.”
Eliot Coleman at Four Season Farm in Maine, sowing pea vetch and oat with a chest seeder.
Photo Courtesy of Eliot Coleman
Tilling Green Manure
Eliot notes that tillage critics will point out that tilling soil introduces oxygen and accelerates the breakdown of organic matter, but he counters that if the organic matter doesn’t break down, the nutrients won’t be available to crops.
When Eliot was first starting out, he would often see tiller ads showing tidy garden plots. “You wouldn’t have known there was anything about gardening other than making it look nice,” he says.
If all a tiller does is get rid of weeds that are an inch tall, tilling will do a lot of damage to the soil, he says. But turning in green manure, such as 6-foot tall rye and vetch, will benefit the soil.
The late former county extension agent Edward H. Faulkner, the author of 1943’s “Plowman’s Folly,” observed that a classic plow buried all the surface organic matter in an airless pile at the bottom of the furrow. But he had a lot more to say about plowing.
“When I see all these websites today, and even articles, celebrating Faulkner as the father of ‘no-till,’ well, these people should be embarrassed,” Eliot says. “They didn’t read past the title of Faulkner’s book — because he was actually a hundred percent in favor of tillage.”
A tiller suitable for a home garden.
Photo Credit: Barbara Damrosch
Faulkner explained in the sequel “A Second Look” that his theory is that all a farmer had to do was to grow green manure or use cover crops, and mix them into the top four inches of the soil. “And the benefit of that was, if organic matter breaks down in your soil, it gives off carbon dioxide,” Eliot says. Carbon dioxide dissolves in moisture to become the weak but very useful acid called carbonic acid.
“And carbonic acid in the soil then can etch nutrients out of the soil particles,” he explains. “Now the soil particles are just ground up rock. But that’s where all the minerals are. So by mixing the organic matter into the top four inches and creating this carbonic acid, you were almost creating your own fertilizer factory. And that was how Faulkner understood it.”
Faulkner’s theory was very close to correct, Eliot says. “Recent understandings of carbonic acid say pretty much the same thing.”
Eliot also notes that tilling in organic material is a lot less work than taking cuttings away to another area to compost them, and then having to bring all that finished compost back.
Eliot is a genius when it comes to coming up with all kinds of systems that make work more efficient.
“I’ve run an organic market gardener for 50 years, and I refer to it as some of the most relentless work you can do because you can’t stop paying attention,” he says.
The tall green manure in the background is much larger than the edible crops in the foreground. It will add a voluminous amount of valuable organic matter to the soil.
Photo Courtesy of Eliot Coleman
Recycle Nutrients and You’ll Never Run Out
Farmer Leonard Wickenden, who wrote “Make Friends With Your Land” and “Gardening with Nature,” was an early enthusiast for organic growing. This was ironic because he was also a chemist and a past president of the American Chemical Society.
Wickenden rejected the suggestion that continually tilling in what’s grown in a field and never bringing in outside fertilizer will eventually exhaust the soil. But he said the trick is to figure out how to recycle all these nutrients in your soil rather than worrying about whether you’re going to exhaust them. He pointed out that minerals are abundant in soil and it would take at least 10,000 years to exhaust the soil — which doesn’t seem like a pressing problem.
An uplifting sign above Four Season Farm.
Photo Courtesy of Eliot Coleman
Why Municipal Compost Isn’t Suited to Your Edible Garden
Eliot refutes advice to cover a garden with municipal compost or commercial compost. Composting operations that are paid to dispose of organic material are not being paid to make clean compost.
“The quality of composts available for purchase today — especially the ones from confined animal feeding operations and municipal sources — if you’ve ever looked into it, it’s embarrassing how much pollution there is in that,” Eliot says.
Farmers in Maine ran into contamination from PFAS, a class of forever chemicals. Many farms were even condemned. This happened because the state agricultural department had encouraged the farmers to spread sludge from septic treatment plants on their fields.
“When I read that all of the sludge in Europe is spread on farmland and always has been, it made me want to avoid Parisian restaurants,” Eliot says.
Young, hotshot organic growers, he says, are right that organic matter in the soil is what makes organic gardening and farming work. “And we’ve known about that for years. But the quality of the organic matter definitely has an effect on the quality of the produce that you grow in that soil. And we have a very strong sense of responsibility to the customers who come here and buy their produce from us. And we think it’s our responsibility to make sure that we are growing as clean produce as we possibly can.”
Eliot uses compost he makes himself, or even better, he just turns green manure into the soil, rather than bringing in outside inputs that could contaminate his fields.
Photo Courtesy of Eliot Coleman
Using Green Manure in the Home Garden
In the 1950s, researchers in New Jersey studied whether soil fertility there was deteriorating. They found that planting a grass-legume pasture mix and leaving it to grow for one year, then turning it into the soil rather than taking any organic matter away, provided fertility for three years.
“I am recommending to home gardeners now that they divide their garden in half and every spring, put one half of it into a legume and grass mix,” Eliot says.
Leave the green manure to grow all year while raising vegetables in the other half of the garden. Then the following year, switch which side is grown on and which side is resting under green manure.
Trialing Green Manure
When Eliot started his farm 40 years ago, he had the benefit of access to horse manure from a neighboring farm. He’s been asked if he could have brought his soil fertility up to the level where it needed to be by only using green manure. This question intrigued him, so he has newly cleared two acres to trial how many years of using green manure it will take to achieve incredibly fertile soil. He’s completed three years so far, and he expects that the answer will be four years.
“The Self-Fed Farm and Garden” by Eliot Coleman.
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Eliot Coleman on the self-fed garden. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
Do you have a self-fed garden? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 048: The Simple Science Behind Great Gardening, with Lee Reich
Episode 086: Timeless Gardening Principles, with Barbara Damrosch
Episode 088: The New Organic Grower: 50-Years in the Making, with Eliot Coleman
Episode 100: Understanding Cover Crops: The Basics and Beyond, with Jack Algiere
Episode 116: Understanding the Soil Food Web, with Dr. Elaine Ingham
Episode 339: Microbe Science for Gardeners, with Robert Pavlis
Episode 407: What Your Food Ate Matters
Episode 435: Start with Soil: The Foundation of Every Garden
joegardener Blog: How to Improve Your Soil: 3 Simple Steps for Making Any Soil Better
The Best of the Must-Haves™ holiday gift guide
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joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Seed Starting: Everything you need to know to start your own plants from seed — indoors and out.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Pests, Diseases & Weeds: Learn the proactive steps to take to manage pests, diseases and weeds for a more successful garden with a lot less frustration. Just $47 for lifetime access!
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
Growing a Greener World® Episode 301: Winter Gardening
Four Season Farm Instagram | @fourseasonfarm
“The Self-Fed Farm and Garden: A Return to the Roots of the Organic Method” by Eliot Coleman | Amazon
“The Self-Fed Farm and Garden: A Return to the Roots of the Organic Method” by Eliot Coleman | Penguin Random House
“Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long” by Eliot Coleman
“Plowman’s Folly” by Edward H. Faulkner
“A Second Look” by Edward H. Faulkner
“The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture” by Albert Howard
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. I receive a commission every time you purchase a product through an Amazon affiliate link. Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Milorganite, Soil3, Territorial Seed Company, Cool Springs Press / Quarto Group and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
