It's not easy, but it's brilliant and could save the world

books:


	• How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits: (And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops) (How to Grow ... John Jeavons Ten Speed Press, 2006 - 268 pages average customer review:based on 26 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A good book with surplus pages

This is a definitive guide to the Bio- Intensive method of growing vegetables. It is well written, and you can see that a lot of time and effort are behind the concepts presented here.
Two things bother me; There`s an almost 100- page bibliography included in the book!? Couldn`t it have been put up on a website or something, instead of just making the book (look) bigger and thicker? The second issue is that I find it always a bit irritating when a lot of equipment or systems get mentioned in a book, but to get their specifics or plans you must buy another book. Maybe the plans for the U- bar or for the mini- greenhouse could have fitted on those bibliography pages?
Anyways, the four stars is for the part where the actual system gets described.

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Planned my Fall/Winter Garden With It

I am fairly new to vegetable gardening and had no clue how much to plant for my wife and I in a Fall/Winter Garden. The book contains many charts and diagrams, which show how many square feet of space to alot for each vegetable. I currently use a hybrid method with 4x4 square foot gardening instead of the large rectangles as suggested in the book since my garden is in my backyard and I do like to have some lawn. A square foot is a square foot, so it really doesn't matter shape/size. There is also some good general gardening advice in the first few chapters. It is a good reference book for the library.

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Not a book for "casual backyard gardening"

The people who are disappointed with this book are the ones who bought it without understanding what it was. This book isn't a "gardening for the soul" book of fluff, nor is it a typical "how to get bigger tomatoes" text.

What this book is is a compendium of information on growing as much food as possible for real, live people to eat.
Yes, it delves into the science and discusses the big, scary numbers involved. For you 'visual types' who find yourselves having to use your fingers to complete a single digit multiplication problem, don't bother. If you want purpler plumbs or redder radishes, look elsewhere.

Assuming your IQ is above 100 and you're looking for a book to tech you some of the skills required to feed your family under all circumstances, I can hardly think of a better book than this one. It is exactly what it says.

If I had to put my family on a fertile island and give them one book on gardening, it would unquestionably be this one.

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It's not easy, but it's brilliant and could save the world

I am impressed at how many people misunderstand the purpose of this book. It's not just a gardening book. It lays out a comprehensive guide to growing the most food you can on the least amount of land in the most sustainable way -- meaning the way that is, on an ongoing basis into perpetuity, most healthy both for your family, your land, and the wider world. All those things are connected, and maintaining the connection is part of what the book and authors are all about.

The title means what it says, and they tell you exactly how to do it, basing their recommendations on the work of the organization that publishes the book, Ecology Action. They have been growing experimental gardens and conducting detailed research over the past 35 years. In succeeding editions of "How to Grow More Vegetables" they summarize their continuing research for those interested in personally benefiting from their methods and discoveries.

Some may object to the excruciatingly detailed charts and plans. Some of us find them a godsend. Regardless of what we think of them, they are the outgrowth of years of research and are intended to help, not just backyard gardeners in the US, but people in Kenya, India, Russia, Mexico, and other places around the world, whose lives and livelihoods, not to mention the health of their environment, may depend on maximizing their yields while minimizing their purchased inputs and water usage.

The central fact underlying this method is this: the only way to achieve the highest sustainable yields is to build and feed your soil, and the only way to build your soil without taking away fertility from someone else's soil (through purchased inputs such as compost, fertilizer, etc.) is to make and use your own compost. This book explains why, and shows you how. It works.

Though we are still shielded from it in the US, the world is facing a potentially devastating loss of agricultural fertility due to a combination of squandered topsoil (lost through both development and abuse by chemicals and poor tillage practices), water shortages, and soaring prices and reduced availability of fossil fuels (which power the farm equipment, get it to market, and form the basis of most chemical fertilizers). Years ago, Ecology Action set out to discover in a rational and scientific way, just how much land and labor it would take to grow the amount of food, properly balanced for calories and nutrition, required by one person for one year. Could a family of four truly feed itself from a 1200 square foot garden if it had to, or wanted to? How much work and water would it take? How much fertilizer would they have to buy? Could they grow their own fertilizer? What tools would they need? What about fiber for clothing? Building materials? Animal feed?

The "How to Grow More Vegetables" books answer those questions, and much, much more. As the years go by, (and with each succeeding food contamination scandal) more of us, even in the US, are realizing just how important those questions are. You may not need or want all the information in this book. But it is all there, and nowhere else that I am aware of, for those who do want it.

This book could save the world, if only the world would pay attention. But it will also show you how to grow fabulous, tasty vegetables with less water, less work, less weeding, less money.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

A classic in the field of sustainable gardening, HOW TO GROW MORE VEGETABLES shows how to produce a beautiful organic garden with minimal watering and care, whether it's just a few tomatoes in a tiny backyard or enough food to feed a family of four on less than half an acre. Updated with the latest biointensive tips and techniques, this is an essential reference for gardeners of all skill levels seeking to grow some or all of their own food.

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