Dinner with Helen and Scott Nearing: Growing Vegetables Year-Round in Vermont

Helen and Scott Nearing grew all the vegetables they ate at their Vermont and Maine homesteads--all year round.

When Helen and Scott Nearing first bought their homestead in Vermont in 1932, they didn’t live there year-round. For the first eight years, they traveled between their New York apartment and the Vermont farmstead every two or three months. It wasn’t until they moved full-time to Vermont in 1940 that they started growing all their own organic vegetables.

Vegetables were very important to the Nearings because they ate a mostly vegan diet. Horrified by the “revolting practice of consuming decaying animal carcasses,” “the secretion of mammary glands of cows,” and “the reproductive media of birds,” they ate mainly vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. A typical breakfast in the Nearing home was a big bowl of fruit, sometimes drizzled with honey or maple syrup. Lunch was typically vegetable soup and baked or boiled wheat, buckwheat, or millet. Dinner was usually a large salad of seasonal vegetables, tossed with lemon juice and olive oil. “With vegetables, fruits, nuts and cereals we proved that one could maintain a healthy body as an operating base for a sane mind and a purposeful harmless life,” they wrote in their 1955 book Living the Good Life.

All that's left of the Nearings' first Maine greenhouse now are the stone walls.

To the surprise of their Vermont neighbors, the Nearings were able to grow vegetables to eat all year round on their homestead. They did not can, dry, or freeze any of their produce. Their secret to fresh vegetables in the winter was twofold—a sun-heated greenhouse and root cellars. They built their greenhouses out of stone and concrete, using the Flagg method of construction. The lower part of the walls were stone, and the roof was glass. The thick stone provided insulation, while the glass captured sunlight. On their final greenhouse in Maine, the south-facing stone wall was lower than the north wall, leaving room for more glass to catch the low angle of sunlight in the winter. The Nearings used this greenhouse to start transplants for the garden. They also grew lettuce in the greenhouse over the winter.

Helen Nearing in the second Maine greenhouse.

What did eating seasonally look like for the Nearings? In February or March, they harvested overwintered parsnips, which they ate along with salsify, celeriac, leeks, and chicory. When the asparagus poked up its tender green spears in April and May, they ate that for six to eight weeks, alogn with dandelion greens, chives, and bunching onions. By late May they had fresh spinach, radishes, mustard greens, garden cress, and lettuce. June and July brought snap peas, beets, lettuce, green beans, and summer squash. In August they added sweet corn, tomatoes, shell beans, broccoli, cauliflower, and celery. By September and October they could harvest cabbage, winter squash, turnips, rutabagas, carrots, and potatoes to store for the winter—until it was time to dig parsnips again.

The Nearings' second Maine greenhouse is still in use today and open for tours at the Good Life Center.

In the summer, all the fruit the Nearings ate was also from their farm—strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, melons, and peaches. But in the winter, they bought bananas, raisins, oranges, and dates. They felt like it was more important to eat fresh fruit every day than to be strict about only eating food they grew themselves.

The Nearings always welcomed visitors to share a meal in return for their farm work. “They came to us all days of the week and we served them raw cauliflower and boiled wheat!” they wrote. “Such a fare sent many a traveler on his way soon enough.” But “there were those of our way of living and eating who said they had with us some of the best meals of their lives.”