Self-fed Farm and Garden : A Return to the Roots of the Organic Method

"Essential rules from a champion of organic growing."—New York Times

Named to the Civil Eats "2025 Food and Farming Holiday Book Gift Guide"

“A radical yet timeless understanding of what organic farming is truly about. . . . Only Eliot could bring such clarity and wisdom to the conversation. . . . A must-read for anyone who believes that food can be a force for change. . . . A new classic for the ages.”
—Jean-Martin Fortier, author of The Market Gardener; founder, Market Gardener Institute

In The Self-Fed Farm and Garden, renowned organic grower and best-selling author Eliot Coleman presents the organic method as the self-sustaining system it was meant to be, rooted in soil health care. With clarity and confidence born from years of experience, he shows readers how they can shift to a model that continually recharges the soil with organic matter, thus allowing the soil food web to provide all the nutrients that crops need for healthy growth and excellent yields.

Filled with the same groundbreaking spirit of his now-classic The Winter Harvest Handbook—which introduced market gardeners to the simple, low-cost techniques by which they could harvest commercial vegetables all winter long—Coleman now shares his equally simple and dependable low-cost system for creating and maintaining guaranteed pure organic soil fertility that will carry your crop yields to perfection.

The self-fed approach combines classic techniques practiced by the pioneers of organic farming, including:
• Growing green manure crops year-round and shallowly tilling them into the soil
• Growing leguminous plants to add nitrogen
• Devising effective crop rotation systems for disease and weed control

Implementing a self-fed system, Coleman explains, saves money and energy, avoids the hassles of acquiring outside organic matter (which can also introduce undesirable incidental pollutants into the soil), and covers everything that needs to be done to maintain soil fertility. Using classic techniques like green manures as a living soil improvement system ultimately allows you alone—not the farm and garden products industry—to be the master of your destiny.

“This book steps back from the frantic energy of the marketplace to take a second look at what we mean when we say ‘organic,’ why we need it, and how to do it right.”
—Dave Chapman, codirector, Real Organic Project

Eliot Coleman is the author of The New Organic Grower, Four Season Harvest, and The Winter Harvest Handbook. He has more than 50 years’ experience in all aspects of organic farming, including field vegetables, greenhouse vegetables, rotational grazing of cattle and sheep, and range poultry. During his careers as a commercial market gardener, the director of agricultural research projects, and as a teacher and lecturer on organic gardening, he studied, practiced, and perfected his craft. With his wife, Barbara Damrosch, he was the host of the TV series, Gardening Naturally, on The Learning Channel, which featured their market garden and home garden projects at Four Season Farm in Harborside, Maine.