Food Gardens for a Changing World


Book Description

Food gardening is becoming increasingly popular, as people look for new ways to live more sustainably and minimize harm to the environment. This book addresses the 21st century trends which bring new challenges to food gardening - anthropogenic climate change, environmental degradation, natural resource scarcity, and social inequity - and explains the basic biological, ecological and social concepts needed to understand and respond to them. Examples throughout the text demonstrate how to successfully use these concepts, while supporting gardeners' values, and their goals for themselves, their communities and the world.







Groundbreaking Food Gardens


Book Description

Follow your zany muse and get creative with your vegetable garden. Niki Jabbour brings you 73 novel and inspiring food garden designs that include a cocktail garden featuring all the ingredients for your favorite drinks, a spicy retreat comprising 24 varieties of chile peppers, and a garden that’s devoted to supplying year-round salad greens. Created by celebrated gardeners, each unique design is accompanied by both plant lists and charming anecdotes. This fully illustrated collection glitters with off-beat personality and quirkiness.




The Grand Food Bargain


Book Description

When it comes to food, Americans seem to have a pretty great deal. Our grocery stores are overflowing with countless varieties of convenient products. But like most bargains that are too good to be true, the modern food system relies on an illusion. It depends on endless abundance, but the planet has its limits. So too does a healthcare system that must absorb rising rates of diabetes and obesity. So too do the workers who must labor harder and faster for less pay. Through beautifully-told stories from around the world, Kevin Walker reveals the unintended consequences of our myopic focus on quantity over quality. A trip to a Costa Rica plantation shows how the Cavendish banana became the most common fruit in the world and also one of the most vulnerable to disease. Walker’s early career in agribusiness taught him how pressure to sell more and more fertilizer obscured what that growth did to waterways. His family farm illustrates how an unquestioning belief in “free markets” undercut opportunity in his hometown. By the end of the journey, we not only understand how the drive to produce ever more food became hardwired into the American psyche, but why shifting our mindset is essential. It starts, Walker argues, with remembering that what we eat affects the wider world. If each of us decides that bigger isn’t always better, we can renegotiate the grand food bargain, one individual decision at a time.




Food Not Lawns


Book Description

Combines practical wisdom on ecological design and community-building with a fresh, green perspective on an age-old subject. Activist and urban gardener Heather Flores shares her nine-step permaculture design to help farmsteaders and city dwellers alike build fertile soil, promote biodiversity, and increase natural habitat in their own "paradise gardens." This joyful lifestyle manual inspires readers to apply the principles of the paradise garden--simplicity, resourcefulness, creativity, mindfulness, and community--to all aspects of life. Plant "guerrilla gardens" in barren intersections and medians; organize community meals; start a street theater troupe or host a local art swap; free your kitchen from refrigeration and enjoy truly fresh, nourishing foods from your own plot of land; work with children to create garden play spaces. Flores cares passionately about the damaged state of our environment and our throwaway society. Here, she shows us how to reclaim the earth, one garden at a time.--From publisher description.




Legacy


Book Description

Tia Chandler's status-conscious West Los Angeles lifestyle of SUVs, sterile corporate offices, and shopping malls all changes the day her father is brutally murdered. Through her father's radical environmental books, Tia learns of the crisis around her, and is horrified that her lifestyle is contributing to it.




Sustainable Food Gardens


Book Description

Dismantle your gardening myths. Grow a garden grounded in fact. Master gardener Robert Kourik deftly guides the reader through the mysteries of growing plants and designing landscapes in temperate climates and suburbs, and the use of all-natural, sustainable methods to grow and maintain a healthy variety of plants. Would you like to garden without digging, composting, buying fertilizers, spraying with pesticides, or lamenting low yields? If so, Sustainable Food Gardening is the book you've been waiting for, with over 450 pages, 13 chapters, 487 color photos, illustrations, charts, and graphs, and a 10-page index. Author Robert Kourik began his career in natural landscape design and maintenance in 1974, with one of the first sustainably oriented organic gardening businesses in the country. In Sustainable Food Gardening, you'll learn to: Design your own "edible landscapes." Use no-till techniques to preserve the integrity of your soil Adapt your growing space to fit into a wide range of USDA garden zones Review alternative ways to change "guilds' (well-intended clusters of trees and shrubs jumbled together) to more effective and labor-saving plantings. Grow new kinds of beautiful and productive Victory gardens Plant Native American "Three-Sisters" gardens that actually work Learn many myths about roots, and what to do to help them thrive Attract many beneficial insects to your garden with strategic flower plantings Here are some of the other topics covered in depth: Rainwater catchment/cisterns. Hügelkulturs (do you really need raised garden beds filled with rotten wood?). Options for better, faster ways to maximize and improve soil. "Dynamic accumulation"--a myth with some useful guidelines. Avoiding hours of tree-pruning and encouraging fruiting with a few dozen clothespins. Clever ways to install and simplify drip irrigation Using plants to lure good insects that prey upon pests. Promoting beneficial soil life. Adding food crops to a native-looking landscape. In Sustainable Food Gardening you'll learn how to achieve that Holy Grail of gardening--productivity, tasty food, and a beautiful, sustainable garden, yard, or landscape.




The Healthy Vegetable Garden


Book Description

Whether you’re an experienced gardener, homesteader, or market farmer, this A–Z, soil-to-table guide shows you how to reduce chemical inputs; naturally enrich your growing ecology; and create a hardy, nutrient-dense, and delicious crop. "There are few gardeners (or farmers) I know who wouldn’t benefit from reading Sally Morgan’s new book. . . . The Healthy Vegetable Garden is a detailed and indispensable resource."—Hobby Farms In The Healthy Vegetable Garden, expert organic gardener Sally Morgan explains how to use natural approaches to cope with the challenges of a changing climate through principles from regenerative gardening, agroecology, and permaculture—all to help your green space thrive. The Healthy Vegetable Garden shows you how to: Combat disease and keep pests at bay with natural predators, companion planting, and trap and barrier crops Choose the right plants to attract pollinators and pest predators Build a healthy soil full of organic matter, earthworms, and mycorrhizal fungi Regenerate soil through no-dig practices, composting, cover crops, and mulching Boost biodiversity through the use of crop rotations and polyculture Rewild your garden by creating a range of habitats, making use of walls and fences, log piles, water features, and wild corners Understand plant defenses and use biocontrols Make natural barriers, traps, and lures A healthy, productive garden should work in harmony with nature to produce and protect delicious fruits and vegetables and build a rich soil that is full of life. With The Healthy Vegetable Garden, growers of all levels will start reducing incidents of pests and diseases while creating a verdant habitat—all without the need for fertilizers, pesticides, or weedkillers.




Growing Good Food


Book Description

A handbook for growing a victory garden when the enemy is global warming Written by regenerative farmer Acadia Tucker, Growing Good Food calls on us to take up regenerative gardening, also known as carbon farming, for the good of the planet. By building carbon-rich soil, even in a backyard-sized patch, we can capture greenhouse gases and mitigate climate change, all while growing nutritious food. To help us get started, and quickly, Tucker draft plans for gardeners who have no space, a little space, or a lot of space. She offers advice on how to prep soil, plant food, and raise the most popular fruits and vegetables using regenerative methods. She shares the gardening tools you need to get started, the top reasons gardens fail and how to fix them, and how to make carbon farming count when the only dirt you have is in pots. The book includes calls to action and insights from leaders in the regenerative movement, including David Montgomery, Gabe Brown, and Tim LaSalle. Aimed at beginners, the book is designed to inspire an uprising of citizen gardeners. Growing Good Food suggests what could happen if more of us saw gardening as a civic duty. By the end of it, you'll know how to grow some really good food and build a healthier world, too. Growing Good Food: A citizen's guide to backyard carbon farming is part of Stone Pier's "Growing Good Food" series. It joins Growing Perennial Foods: A field guide to raising resilient herbs, fruits, and vegetables, also written by Acadia Tucker.




Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land


Book Description

This book lays out a variety of practical ways to prepare for a changing climate by paying attention to soil, water harvesting, types of crops planted, and ways to protect pollinators.