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Gardening. Home Design & Déco Nonfictio HTML: "Gaia's Garden will be recorded in history as a milestone for gardeners and landscapers. . . An amazing achievement."�??Paul Stamets The classic book about ecological gardening�??whatever size your garden�??with over 250,000 copies sold! "A great book!"�??Men's Journal Gaia's Garden has sparked the imagination of home gardeners the world over by introducing a simple message: working with nature, not against her, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens. Many people mistakenly think that "ecological gardening"�??which involves growing a wide range of edible and other useful plants�??can take place only on a large, multiacre scale. As Hemenway demonstrates, it's fun and easy�??even for the beginner�??to create a "backyard ecosystem" by assembling communities of plants that can work cooperatively and perform a variety of functions, including: Building and maintaining soil fertility and structure Catching and conserving water in the landscape Providing a rewilded and biodiverse habitat for beneficial insects, birds, and animals Growing an edible "forest" that yields seasonal fruits, nuts, and other foods This revised and updated edition also features a chapter on urban permaculture, designed especially for people in cities and suburbs who have very limited growing space. Whatever size yard or garden you have to work with, you can apply basic permaculture principles to make it more diverse, more natural, more productive, and more beautiful. Best of all, once it's established, an ecological garden will reduce or eliminate most of the backbreaking work that's needed to maintain the typ… (more)
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This well-written books is a great introduction to the topic and is packed full of information. Hemenway covers different types of plants, how to harvest and conserve rainwater, beneficial insects and animals and other topics. The books is only a few hundred pages, and other sources are referenced for more detailed information. Even gardeners looking for a more standard approach will find useful information.
However, I think you would be hard pressed to convince traditional-minded people that their yard needs to become a forest garden, whether it be the trees, or the eventuality of only perennial foods. I do not want one or two tomato plants under my walnut tree. I want tomato plants enough to be able to can all the tomato sauce I need to get my family through the winter in spaghetti and lasagna! I live in Zone 5, so a long cold winter is inevitable, and we cannot just eat toast and jelly with jelly I made from my fruit, or cherry pies. I need annual vegetables, in quantity for my growing children. Though to be fair, I am sure Hemenway would just say, find a way to add beds in a sustainable way! The book is nice because it is not dogmatic. We can have our trees and eat our tomatoes too. It also encourages a regenerative mindset of putting in and improving rather than taking away. This is something that should be more and more important to gardeners. At the same time, he makes the point (gently and without fanfare) near the end of the book that if you have to use a non-renewable resource once to get your regenerative garden into place, it’s probably worth it for the outcome in the long-run. Food grown at home, even if it is sprayed with a pesticide once a year, is still better than food from factory farms.