Will An Unheated Winter Greenhouse Work In Maine?

In the previous post [here] we told of how a friend's off-hand comment inspired us to turn our tiny front porch into an unheated greenhouse - but we still didn't know if it would even work here in the Maine winter.

(by Linda)

Time for some research:

Eliot Coleman's The Winter Harvest Handbook

Naturally, the next step was to ignore whatever pressing but obnoxious task  awaited my attention (balancing the checkbook and paying bills, maybe?) and do some googling.  Was it even possible to grow anything in an unheated greenhouse in Maine in the winter?  (of course it had to be unheated since the whole point was to save some money on food- though having fresh homegrown veggies was a big plus too, not to mention the coolness factor of the whole thing).

        I first got sidetracked by looking up things like how many hours of sunlight various vegetables needed each day, but quickly gave that up as it was way too discouraging, and I was far too enthused to let a bunch of nay-sayers rain on my parade.

Then I ran across Eliot Coleman (find his website here), a gardener actually living in Maine who had been successfully growing veggies in unheated greenhouses for years- and had been thoughtful enough to write a book about it that was actually in the library system.   A little click of the mouse to request one more inter-library loan, and away we go…