FORT KENT, Maine — Retired mill machinist Dan Birt is a pretty popular guy this time of year. Tucked away in a sunny room attached to his Millinocket house is a veritable jungle of vegetables Mainers are more accustomed to seeing at the height of summer, not the dead of winter.
“I had cucumbers for a while, and the tomatoes are really coming with some carrots and beets,” the 92-year-old gardner said this week. “It’s just a small room with some trays across some of the windows, and I just grow what I can and share them.”
Birt is among a growing number of Mainers pushing the region’s gardening season to produce fresh vegetables year-round.
“People are certainly doing it,” Kate Garland, a horticulturist with the University of Maine’s Cooperative Extension office, said. “How much or how involved depends on resources and how much [people] want to invest.”
Extending the season
Maine’s growing season averages 124 days, but those numbers drop the farther north in the state you go to around 111 up in the St. John Valley. Central Maine enjoys around 128 frost-free days while the southern end gets an average of 134 growing days.
Pushing the season on either end, according to Garland, can be as simple or complex as people want to make it.
“Personally, I like to look at it and make it as simple as possible,” she said “I have a busy life and a lot of other people have busy lives, so you really need to assess how much time you have to spend on it.”
Garland said the easiest way to get fresh greens in the winter is to go with simple trays — foil lasagna pans from the store work great, she says. Fill them with potting soil and plant microgreens such as field peas right on a sunny window ledge.
“You are growing them just for the young leaves, and you can harvest in seven or 10 days from planting,” she said. “Harvest and then start again, and the best part is you don’t have to put on boots and go outside.”
At Four Season Farm in Harborside, Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch literally wrote the book — or, rather, several books — on winter gardening in Maine. The two wrote “The Winter Harvest Handbook,” “Four Season Harvest,” “The New Organic Grower” and a cookbook.
“If you are going to earn a living gardening in Maine, you need a slightly longer season than the weather allows,” Coleman said. “So we started pushing the end of the season.”
The couple began with a simple greenhouse, then added cold frames inside the structure.
“Outside it was Maine in the winter, but the greenhouse moves you 500 miles to the south [and] the cold frames added another 500 miles,” he said. “So the stuff in there were actually in Georgia.”
Now crops such as spinach, Swiss chard, kale and lettuce are started inside the greenhouse in the fall and harvested all winter.
When temperatures outside really dip below freezing, Coleman said, the greens will freeze at night but warm up in time for harvest the next morning
“They are harvestable and delicious,” he said. “When these vegetables grow in cooler temperatures, they are just sweeter.”
The couple sells their produce, which also includes radishes and turnips, at the weekly Blue Hill Winter Farmers Market on Saturdays at Mainescape Nursery, part of a thriving Maine winter farmers market network.
“It’s really fun because nobody expects seeing vegetables in the winter,” Coleman said. “It’s really more fun than the summer markets.”
At Sunset Farms Organics in Lyman, farmer Paul Lorrain is a fan of Coleman and winter gardening.
Lorrain said he got into winter farming about 17 years ago at his wife’s suggestion, when lack of snow was impacting his snow-removal business.
“My wife wanted me to find something to do in the middle of a no-snow winter,” he said. “I read an article on Eliot Coleman and visited him, and he became my mentor.”
Lorrain started with one greenhouse and today has a dozen filled with lettuce, kale, Swiss chard and other salad greens which he sells to several area markets.
“I’m growing the same things our grandparents did in cold frames next to their houses,” he said.
More than 350 miles to the north, James Delancy of Rankin Rapids Farm in St. Francis, was working his new greenhouse this week.
On a recent morning outside it was 8 degrees with a steady snowfall. Inside, the unfinished, unheated space attached to his house was a comfortable 60 degrees.
“It’s extremely important to have something like a greenhouse up here in northern Maine,” Delancy said. “By having them, I’m adding 60 days to my growing season.”
Last year Delancy was able to grow sweet potatoes in his greenhouse, a tuber for which the area’s growing season is far too short.
“I also grew some peanuts as an experiment,” he said. “I did not sell any this year but hope to next season.”
Delancy is building the greenhouse on what had been his home’s deck, something he called “the most useless piece of equipment in northern Maine.”
Instead of a structure usable in the brief period between the true colds and bug season, the deck is enclosed and insulation being placed in the walls. Rankin Rapids produces enough vegetables for Delancy to sell at the Fort Kent Farmers’ Market, and he hopes the additional greenhouse will increase and extend his production.
Winter slows down but doesn’t stop growing
Conventional wisdom, according to those who grow winter vegetables in Maine, suggests you need at least 10 hours of daylight for plants to grow.
In Maine, that ends around Nov. 5 and does not pass the 10 hour mark again until early February.
“For me, once the sunlight goes under 10 hours things really slow down,” Lorrain said. “If I’m picking my Swiss chard once a week at the end of October, come December I’m picking every three weeks. Growth does not stop, but it really slows down.”
Things have not slowed down much at all at the Regional School Unit 39 greenhouses, where agriculture and natural resources instructor Casey Cote and her students at the Caribou Regional Technology Center operate a greenhouse that produces enough lettuce and tomatoes to supply the high school’s salad bar.
“Our goal is to get the plants to be 75 percent mature by the time the shortest day of the year comes along,” Cote said. “After that, we do use artificial light, but we have been weening the plants off that as we approach 10 hours of natural daylight.”
Getting them to that 75 percent maturation point, she said, ensures the plants have the strength to make it through the shorter days.
“We really see a difference when they start getting the natural light,” Cote said. “There is new growth, and they really perk up.”
Back in Millinocket, Dan Birt has two 4-foot bulbs for his greenhouse that he says cost around $57 per month to operate.
“You got to have light,” he said. “And yeah it costs a bit extra, but when you [have] a hobby, it costs you money.”
A longtime master gardener, Birt’s “hobby” is his friends’ and neighbors’ windfall.
“I mostly give my vegetables away,” he said. “I could have had more cucumbers this winter, but they were taking up too much space, so I took them out.”
He replaced the cucumbers with tomatoes and already are ripening.
“Everybody likes them,” he said. “I’m very popular, and people can’t understand how I get these vegetables [and] ask if I grew them outdoors.”
Birt’s favorite veggie to grow and eat are onions. This weekend he plans to put in nearly 4,000 onion seeds.
“I’ll end up giving away most of those 4,000 onion plants,” he said. “I really do enjoy it [because] in the morning you can look and see your plants growing in the winter.”
A list of winter farmers markets in Maine can be seen at mainefarmersmarkets.org/shoppers/winter-markets-2015-2016.
