52 Books: Book 9

This year I have every intention of growing a vegetable garden. Half of my grocery bill is from purchasing fresh produce and I currently have the time to devote to a garden.

To that end, I have been reading books about how to garden. I guess it is the intellectual in me... I want to know what I am getting into before I jump into it.

I just finished the book Gardening When It Counts by Steve Soloman. Soloman takes a slightly different approach to gardening that other books I have read. His focus is more on how to get the most out of your garden with less work. He takes inspiration from the early Native Americans and how they grew their gardens without the use of extensive irrigation that we have available to us today. He also goes into great detail about how to give your plants lots of room to grow and how to create your own fertilizers and compost. This is a book I plan to purchase and use as a resource when I actually begin my garden.

Excerpts from the book:

Gardening magazines, garden centers, and seed catalogs all promote the idea that their appealing merchandise is useful and essential – that you need it Actually, to veggie garden successfully you only need a few hand tools, used properly. I am going to educate you about this as your grandfather should have done. But almost none of us had a grandfather who new how to grow vegetables, who grew up on a farm, who sharpened shovels and hoes and worked the earth. If you'll allow it, I am going to be the gardening grandfather you never had.

The word "ethics" means doing what would probably result in the greatest good for the greatest number of people. the opposite of ethics is criminality which is getting something for yourself without giving back anything in exchange. {commenting on the ethics of seed companies}

Instead of planing a garden from which you'll harvest exactly what you want if everything goes well, plant twice as much as you would need, so that pests and diseases could wipe out a third of the garden without stopping you from giving away buckets of food.