Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times (Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series)

Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times (Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series) Features

Additional Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times (Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series) Information

The decline of cheap oil is inspiring increasing numbers of North Americans to achieve some measure of backyard food self-sufficiency. In hard times, the family can be greatly helped by growing a highly productive food garden, requiring little cash outlay or watering.

Currently popular intensive vegetable gardening methods are largely inappropriate to this new circumstance. Crowded raised beds require high inputs of water, fertility and organic matter, and demand large amounts of human time and effort. But, except for labor, these inputs depend on the price of oil. Prior to the 1970s, North American home food growing used more land with less labor, with wider plant spacing, with less or no irrigation, and all done with sharp hand tools. But these sustainable systems have been largely forgotten. Gardening When It Counts helps readers rediscover traditional low-input gardening methods to produce healthy food.

Designed for readers with no experience and applicable to most areas in the English-speaking world except the tropics and hot deserts, this book shows that any family with access to 3-5,000 sq. ft. of garden land can halve their food costs using a growing system requiring just the odd bucketful of household waste water, perhaps two hundred dollars worth of hand tools, and about the same amount spent on supplies — working an average of two hours a day during the growing season.

Steve Solomon is a well-known west coast gardener and author of five previous books, including Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades which has appeared in five editions.

What Customers Say About Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times (Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series):

Pick up an old one at the thriftstore, borrow a book from a neighbor, check out your local expletive deleted library for crisake. The author selected the title only to make sales based off what's in at the moment, self-sufficiency/survivalist know-how. just dont buy this book new unless your project can run into the 100s of dollars and you have a private field. A lot of people are in tough financial situations and one of the best ways to address this would be both the financial and therapeutic benefits of home gardens, lose a job and hell, why not start a home garden to keep sane while saving money. but unfortunately what's happened here is a dry-as-dirt read geared towards higher end more expensive projects, being passed off as a money saver for the little guys going through hard times.this is the WRONG place to start if your living with a medium sized back/front yard, and I promise you wont go wrong with just about any other garden book as a jumping off point. Some, and I mean SOME of this information is good as a backup reference, but that information is widely available, any gardening book will contain it, I got a different one years ago at the thrift store for 1.69 and its been infinitely more helpful.all of what I typed up here would of dropped it to a 2/5 stars,it drops to 1/5 after the condescending tone and total lack of useful illustrations is taken into account. (the only worthwhile pictures in this book were borrowed from another book, and they're just pictures of root layouts, which could of just as easily been covered by labeling plants shallow or deep rooted, this book may as well be straight text)Lacking, Condescending, Mislabeled, technique-specific (large scale only), a real 1 star.

Good book - answers the question "Why does my garden fail again and again." very well. Very detailed explanations on how to get things done yourself and make it work. It does get a little technical - this is definitely not "Gardening for Dummies."

This book is undoubtably full of good information, but it is torturous to read. The authors condecending attitude doesn't help. Maybe this book would work for a hard core gardener, but it's not research for "preppers". Some of the information I have found useful, but the delivery is terrible.

Now that our kids are grown, (I have some spare time) and food prices are increasing, it seems to be time to abandon the intensive method (I am tired of all that digging), and revisit some of the older ways of doing a garden. Reading Mr Solomon's book takes me back to my younger days serving as cheap labor in my fathers garden. Thank you Mr Solomon; you have put much of the good information lost to me for some years into a well written collection. Dad ALWAYS had a good producing, good looking garden. Too bad I didn't appreciate it more and pay closer attention. Although still work, I hope to see a better return on the "sweat equity" investment in the coming garden this summer. Dad has been gone for some time now, but he was right.

Manages to impart his practical farming experience with an anti-establisment undertone. Concepts such as sharpening your shovel and hoes and the difference it makes in labor/efficiency. However the common sense and useful advice outweigh the diatribe. I've gardened and farmed on a small scale and found the book very helpful in giving a real re-learning of forgotten and overlooked basic concepts. The damage to the soil from moldboard plowing and rototilling, the truth about nursery transplants and seed packets are all exposed in candid detail. Not the best prose, but very readable.