Grow Great Grub: Organic Food from Small Spaces -- Gayla Trail
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This book will take away every excuse you have for not growing your own food! Beautifully illustrated, engagingly written and filled with creative ideas for growing, harvesting, and enjoying a huge variety of organic “grub”. Gayla has included practical information to guide every step of the growing process. For example, the chapter on acquiring plants takes the reader through growing from seed to “moving them out” to their final growing area.
Gayla also has an earlier book You Grow Girl and a website, www.yougrowgirl.com , which is well worth a visit.
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The Handbook of Northwest Gardening -- Ann Lovejoy
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Ann Lovejoy, who is the author of more than 18 books, lives and gardens on Bainbridge Island, Washington and in her Handbook of Northwest Gardening, she covers all areas of sustainable, natural gardening geared to the northwest climate and lifestyle.
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The ten guidelines for sustainable garden design that Lovejoy talks about in the first chapter are common sense ideas that everyone can follow. The remaining 13 chapters of this book are packed with information on topics like “delicious dirt,” plant selection and care, dealing with insects and pests and so much more. I loved the easy to make “recipes” for spring feeding mulch, all purpose plant booster and spring border booster.
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If you are looking for a book that details approaches to all aspects of organic, sustainable gardening in a straight forward style—enhanced with beautiful colour photographs by Janet Loughrey—then The Handbook of Northwest Gardening is one you shouldn’t miss.
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Other must-have books
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A Year on The Garden Path by Carolyn Herriot. Carolyn is a well-known gardener from Victoria and has provided leadership through writing, speaking, and running a nursery for many years. She has a recently published book Zero Mile Diet that I canʼt wait to devour - although as #57 on the library waitlist, it will be awhile.
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Gaiaʼs Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway. An amazing and enlightening book that introduces the reader to the concept of the “ecological garden”. If you are serious about shifting your gardening paradigm, this is an essential book to have.If youʼre not quite there yet, borrow it from the library.
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The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating -- Alisa Smith and I.B. MacKinnon
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A thoroughly enjoyable read, I found this book funny, inspiring, educational, and, most of all, hopeful. And the recipes...hmmm...interesting.
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In the words of the authors: “Even the ugly statistic - at least 1,500 miles from farm to plate for the typical food item in North America - had proved to be only a gateway into a deeper problem.” (p. 221)
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This book then became a journal of their exploration into the deeper problem and some of the solutions they discovered. They began with the idea of eating only local food for one year and eventually defined that to mean eating only food that was created within one hundred miles of their home in Vancouver. A plan that seemed simple quickly became complicated when their trip to the local supermarket yielded nothing that qualified for their new eating plan.
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For the ensuing year they found not only a way to eat within their rules, but also made astonishing discoveries about the world we currently live in. I hope you’ll read it; this is a critical piece of awareness-raising for anyone who cares about where we are and how we got here.
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The Winter Harvest Handbook -- Eliot Coleman
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Eliot Coleman has 40 years experience in all aspects of organic farming. In his latest book “The Winter Harvest Handbook,” he shares his vast knowledge and experience in growing fresh vegetables all year round without hothouses, even in the coldest climates. The winter harvest, as practiced at Coleman’s Four Season Farm in Maine has three components: cold-hardy vegetables, succession planting and protected cultivation. The book provides detailed and concise information on the crops, tools, planting schedules and techniques Coleman uses to manage his year round farming operation.
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Although the book is geared more for commercial growers, anyone who is seriously interested in growing organic vegetables will benefit from Coleman’s wealth of knowledge and the beautiful colour pictures will inspire all gardeners.