Maria Rodale's Organic Gardening


Book Description

Maria Rodale, the third generation of the family that originated the organic gardening movement in the United States, has written a comprehensive and easy-to-use guide to designing and planting an organic garden that is beautiful, as well as delicious. No longer is the organic garden filled with messy homemade pest traps, plant ties from old pantyhose and recycled Coke-bottle watering devices. Maria Rodale takes organic gardening to a new level. Using sophisticated design techniques from authorities in every field of gardening, readers will learn the secrets of creating a flowering landscape that's gorgeous and productive, time- and energy-efficient, and filled with hearty fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Conveniently divided by season, addressing specific gardening issues, Maria Rodale's Organic Garden includes delicious recipes, and 600 color photographs. Every gardener, from beginner to advanced, will cherish this invaluable guide.




Organic Manifesto


Book Description

Rodale was founded on the belief that organic gardening is the key to better health both for us and for the planet, and never has this message been more urgent. Now, with Organic Manifesto, Maria Rodale, chairman of Rodale, sheds new light on the state of 21st century farming. She examines the unholy alliances that have formed between the chemical companies that produce fertilizer and genetically altered seeds, the agricultural educational system that is virtually subsidized by those same companies, and the government agencies in thrall to powerful lobbyists, all of which perpetuate dangerous farming practices and deliberate misconceptions about organic farming and foods. Interviews with government officials, doctors, scientists, and farmers from coast to coast bolster her position that chemical-free farming may be the single most effective tool we have to protect our environment and, even more important, our health.







Scratch


Book Description

Maria Rodale was raised on real food. She doesn’t think of eating homemade, from-scratch meals as part of a trend or movement; it has always been her life. Raised in a family of farmers, bakers, chefs, gardeners, and publishers, Maria is used to growing, cooking, reading and writing about, and eating organic, delicious food. And now, for the first time ever, she’s sharing her tried-and-true family recipes. Scratch is full of comfort food recipes that aren’t focused on any one healthy trend, but are instead innately healthy, because Maria inspires you to return to your kitchen and cook with real, organic food. Recipes like Pasta Fagiole, Maria’s Fried Chicken, and Lamb & Barley Soup will be crowd pleasers for sure, but Maria throws in some unique-to-the-family recipes that are going to delight as well, such as her Pennsylvania Dutch Dandelion Salad with Bacon Dressing, Ardie’s Pasties, and Homemade Hoppin’ John (a black-eyed pea stew made with smoked turkey or ham). Besides sharing her family’s favorite recipes, Maria’s book also gives you a peek into her life as a Rodale, with personal family portraits and stories. With this cookbook, you can eat like the Rodale family every night of the week with delicious food to make at home, from scratch. Naturally healthy, bacon included.




Kitchen Garden Revival


Book Description

Elevate your backyard veggie patch into a work of sophisticated and stylish art. Kitchen Garden Revival guides you through every aspect of kitchen gardening, from design to harvesting—with expert advice from author Nicole Johnsey Burke, founder of Rooted Garden, one of the leading US culinary landscape companies, and Gardenary, an online kitchen gardening education and resource company. Participating in the grow-your-own movement is important to both reduce your food miles and control what makes it onto your family’s table. If you’ve hesitated to take part because installing and caring for a traditional vegetable garden doesn’t seem to suit your life or your sense of style, Kitchen Garden Revival is here to show you there’s a better, more beautiful way to grow food. Instead of row after row of cabbage and pepper plants plunked into a patch of dirt in the middle of the yard, kitchen gardens are attractive, highly tailored food gardens consisting of easy-to-maintain raised planting beds laid out in an organized geometric pattern. Offering both four seasons of ornamental interest and plenty of fresh, homegrown fruits, vegetables, and herbs, kitchen gardens are the way to grow your own food in a fashionable, modern, and practical way. Kitchen gardens were once popular features of the European and early American landscape, but they fell out of favor when our agrarian roots were displaced by industrialization. With this accessible and inspirational guide, Nicole aims to return the kitchen garden to its rightful place just outside of every backdoor. Learn the art of kitchen gardening as you discover: What characteristics all kitchen gardens have in common How to design and install gorgeous kitchen garden beds using metal, wood, or stone Why raised beds mean reduced maintenance What crops are best for your kitchen garden A planting, tending, and harvesting plan developed by a pro Season-by-season growing guides It's time to join the Kitchen Garden Revival and start growing your own delicious, organic food.




This Common Ground


Book Description

In the tradition of Michael Pollan, Joan Gussow, and Verlyn Klinkenborg's The Rural Life, This Common Ground is an inspirational evocation of a life lived close to the earth, written by the head farmer at one of the country's first community-supported farms. By reflecting on four seasons of activity at his beloved Quail Hill Farm in eastern Long Island, Scott Chaskey offers stirring insight into the connections between land and the human family. Whether writing about the voice of a small wren nesting in the lemon balm or a meadow of oats, millet, and peas rising to silver and green after a fresh rain, this poet-farmer's contagious sense of wonder brings us back to our bond with the soil.




The Ann Lovejoy Handbook of Northwest Gardening


Book Description

The organic gardening movement has been long established among vegetable growers. With the mainstreaming of ideas about environmental and ecological preservation, the organic movement has come to ornamental gardening. And one of the primary spokespeople for that movement is Sasquatch’s longtime author Ann Lovejoy. This new book is a complete handbook for ornamental gardening follows the principles and techniques of organic and sustainable gardening. Gardening naturally does mean going without products like Roundup, Weed and Feed, and chemical fertilizers. It also means that gardeners may opt for a selection of native plants that are compatible with local climate and soils. Some of the paradigm shift has to do with getting over the notion that one’s garden needs to be as spotless and tidy as something on a magazine cover. Gardening is all about process, and the methods that Ann Lovejoy explains in this book emphasize good soil preparation, composting, drainage, mulching, and right plant selection. This comprehensive book covers the steps from landscaping and designs to soil preparation to planting beds. She covers all of the elements of the garden: ground covers, lawns, shrubs, bulbs, trees – all with an eye to building a sustainable garden that grows without chemical fertilizers and pest control. You can try to make an Arizona backyard look like a Connecticut estate, but it’s going to take a lot of work, constant maintenance, more water than all the other gardens on your block, and a fat checkbook. There’s a simpler, more gratifying way to garden that is also good for people, pets, and wildlife. This practical book tells gardeners how to achieve that.







Tomatoland


Book Description

2012 IACP Award Winner in the Food Matters category Supermarket produce sections bulging with a year-round supply of perfectly round, bright red-orange tomatoes have become all but a national birthright. But in Tomatoland, which is based on his James Beard Award-winning article, "The Price of Tomatoes," investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but has also produced fruits with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C, and tomatoes that have fourteen times more sodium than the tomatoes our parents enjoyed. The relentless drive for low costs has fostered a thriving modern-day slave trade in the United States. How have we come to this point? Estabrook traces the supermarket tomato from its birthplace in the deserts of Peru to the impoverished town of Immokalee, Florida, a.k.a. the tomato capital of the United States. He visits the laboratories of seedsmen trying to develop varieties that can withstand the rigors of agribusiness and still taste like a garden tomato, and then moves on to commercial growers who operate on tens of thousands of acres, and eventually to a hillside field in Pennsylvania, where he meets an obsessed farmer who produces delectable tomatoes for the nation's top restaurants. Throughout Tomatoland, Estabrook presents a who's who cast of characters in the tomato industry: the avuncular octogenarian whose conglomerate grows one out of every eight tomatoes eaten in the United States; the ex-Marine who heads the group that dictates the size, color, and shape of every tomato shipped out of Florida; the U.S. attorney who has doggedly prosecuted human traffickers for the past decade; and the Guatemalan peasant who came north to earn money for his parents' medical bills and found himself enslaved for two years. Tomatoland reads like a suspenseful whodunit as well as an expose of today's agribusiness systems and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.




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.