Great Read

I haven't made my way through the whole book yet, but what a great start - good organization, fabulous ideas and examples, nice mix of philosophy and method, more than ample motivation and inspiration to start my own food forest!

[Monday, December 22, 2008]

Eye-Opening

Maybe I'm naive and uninformed, but I found this book eye-opening. I did read it a couple years ago now, but its ideas and principles were fascinating to me. Much of what it recommends, I was already doing, because most of my gardening techniques come from foggy memories of my grandmothers and their gardens. Because both my grandmothers were pretty poor (dirt poor?), they couldn't afford pesticides or herbicides or irrigation or manicured lawns. So, they built up beautiful gardens with crush planting and recycling of resources and careful siting of particular plants. They knew their space and their plants, and they never wasted anything. I try to do what they did and expand on it through what I can learn from books. This book gave me a lot in terms of principles for what I do and why I do it. What I maybe understood on an intuitive level or didn't understand at all but just did, this book provided a foundation for and then built further on that foundation. I'm always in search of more books of this type -- that address how a home-owner can use some of the principles of permaculture and ideas for minimizing work and human input in the garden through more "natural" methods of gardening. Too few books seem to try to tackle such issues on a small scale for single homes. This book was a great start. So, if you didn't have grandmothers like mine but you're interested in learning how to make the most of your garden with the least human input, start with this book.

[Saturday, December 06, 2008]

got my money's worth in one season, for just one technique from this book

The Library journal review does a huge disservice to this book.

Imagine a beautiful, highly productive, virtually weed-free,

drought-resistant, inexpensive, low-maintenance and ecologically sound

garden bed in your yard. It sounds impossible, but it is very simple

and only requires a few hours to create this fall, no digging required.

You can put to use the bounty of leaves and/or pine needles that are

provided for free to almost every suburbanite in the fall. This

is the ideal time, as the bed is better if it can break down over the

winter.

I have been gardening for about 25 years, and wish had I had heard of

this method sooner. It is perfect, especially for those who are not

physically able to dig, till or do a lot of weeding or simply have very

little time for gardening.

It involves piling up and wetting down 8 -12 inches of layers of

organic matter (we used leaves and some manure) on top of a thin layer

of newspapers or cardboard, with a small amount of amendments such as

greensand, lime and rock phosphate and manure underneath the paper. On

the top is a 1-2 inch layer of mulch (we used white pine needles), to

keep in moisture and suppress weeds. Come spring, you simply push aside

the top mulch and plant seedlings.

This 'sheet mulching' method came from this wonderful book by Toby

Hemenway. We have several sheet mulch beds this

year, and they are outrageously productive. For example, one 4' x 9'

bed in a very sunny spot, contains 6 large tomato plants, 3 sweet

pepper plants, 3 cucumber vines on a trellis, a short row of

sunflowers, one summer squash plant, and 7 winter squash plants. I

find this amazing considering that the ground underneath is very poor,

sandy and barely supported grass.


With apologies to Mae West, I have learned a big lesson, it's not the soil

in your life, it's the life in your soil!

I bought this book in January and have many times over saved the price in
time, mulch and bought amendments using ONLY the sheet mulch idea.

[Tuesday, September 09, 2008]

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