Green Gardening
Books to help you achieve better results through low impact or innovative gardening practices. Books to help bring your garden to balance and keeping it there, using the path of least resistance by getting off the chemical merry-go-round.
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The Apple Grower: Guide for the Organic Orchardist
Book Description: For decades fruit growers have sprayed their trees with toxic chemicals in an attempt to control a range of insect and fungal pests. Yet it is possible to grow apples responsibly, by applying the intuitive knowledge of our great-grandparents with the fruits of modern scientific research and innovation.
Since The Apple Grower first appeared in 1998, orchardist Michael Phillips has continued his research with apples, which have been called “organic’s final frontier.” In this new edition of his widely acclaimed work, Phillips delves even deeper into the mysteries of growing good fruit with minimal inputs. Some of the cuttingedge topics he explores include:
- The use of kaolin clay as an effective strategy against curculio and borers, as well as its limitations
- Creating a diverse, healthy orchard ecosystem through understory management of plants, nutrients, and beneficial microorganisms
- How to make a small apple business viable by focusing on heritage and regional varieties, value-added products, and the “community orchard” model
The author’s personal voice and clear-eyed advice have already made The Apple Grower a classic among small-scale growers and home orchardists. In fact, anyone serious about succeeding with apples needs to have this updated edition on their bookshelf.
The Flower Farmer
An Organic Grower's Guide to Growing and Selling Cut Flowers
Book Description: Acre-for-acre, flowers are the most profitable-as well as the most beautiful—crop on the farm. In The Flower Farmer expert flower grower Lynn Byczynski provides a complete introduction to raising a cornucopia of cut flowers for home use and for sale to retail customers, florists, and other markets.
The book offers detailed, manageable plans for flower growing on a scale ranging from a backyard border to a half-acre commercial garden. It will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers, including:
- Home gardeners who want growing tips from professionals, so that they can enjoy an abundance of flowers year-round in fresh and dried bouquets;
- Passionate gardeners and small-scale growers who want to raise and sell cut flowers in season for additional income;
- Small commercial farmers who want to increase farm revenue or even make a living from selling field-grown, specialty cut flowers.
The Flower Farmer provides a clear, realistic look at both the benefits and the challenges of growing flowers organically for local markets. Chapters include information on:
- The best varieties of cut flowers—an A-Z list of more than one hundred recommended annuals and perennials, spotlighting the cultivars that are grown by professional flower farmers
- How to cut, store, and preserve flowers for long-lasting beauty
- How to dry flowers for crafting or for a dried-flower business
- Flower-arranging basics from a designer's perspective
- Extending the season with woody shrubs and trees
- Marketing options for commercial growers, including sales at farmer's markets, supermarkets, florists, and wholesalers.
Sprinkled throughout are profiles of successful flower farmers—from Vermont to California, Texas to Wisconsin—each of them providing a unique perspective proving that growing flowers can be as profitable as it is satisfying.
The domestic cut flower business has experienced a renaissance in the past decade, thanks in large part to the first edition of The Flower Farmer: An Organic Grower’s Guide to Raising and Selling Cut Flowers, which helped thousands of small growers start successful businesses. This newly expanded and thoroughly revised edition will be equally as influential for novices and experienced growers alike.With the cut flower business growing at record rates, demand is at all time highs, challenging growers to take advantage of new techniques to prolong the harvest. New sections on utilizing greenhouses, recommendations for flower cultivars, and post harvest handling growers throughout all of North America will help improve their bottomline. Also updated is the acclaimed resource directory, complete with sources of seeds, plants and supplies, and expert information on organic production under the National Organic Program.
For the beginner and backyard gardener, there is an extensive section on the basics—variety selection, soil preparation, planting, cultivation, harvest, and floral design. For the commercial grower, The Flower Farmer includes information about larger-scale production, plus advice about selling to florists, wholesalers, supermarkets, brides, at farmers markets, and more. Also includes revised profiles of successful growers offering behind-the-scenes insight into the operation of some of the cutting edge flower farmers in the country.
Because of the extensive revisions and enhanced content, this new edition of The Flower Farmer is essential reading for those already in the flower business, as well as those who dream of growing flowers for enjoyment or profit.
About the Author: Lynn Byczynski is publisher and editor of a monthly news letter Growing for Market. She also operates Wild Onion Farm in Lawrence, Kansas, where she resides with her husband and two children. For more information, please visit the website of Growing for Market www.growingformarket.com
The Grape Grower
A Guide to Organic Viticulture
Book Description: Grapes are the most popular and widely grown fruit in the world. From the tropics to Alaska, grapes will grow successfully in almost every climate. Whether you raise them for fresh eating, or for making wine, juice, or jellies and preserves, the right grapes will reward you with abundant crops for a modest investment of time and effort.
Now for the first time comes a book for grape growers who wish to use organic growing methods to raise healthy, thriving vineyards in the backyard or on a small commercial scale. The Grape Grower distills the broad knowledge and long-time personal experience of Lon Rombough, one of North America's foremost authorities on viticulture.
From finding and preparing the right site for your vineyard to training, trellising, and pruning vines to growing new grapes from seeds and cuttings, The Grape Grower offers thorough and accessible information on all the basics. The chapters on grape species, varieties, and hybrids are alone worth the price of a college course in viticulture. Technical information on the major (and minor) insect pests and diseases that affect grapes, as well as their organic controls, makes this book an invaluable reference that readers will turn to again and again.
Rombaugh also provides a wealth of information on hardy but little-known grapes that are native to North America, and on a wide range of topics, including:
- pruning neglected or overgrown vines
- growing grapes on arbors and in greenhouses
- controlling animal pests in the vineyard
- bunch grapes and muscadine grapes for the South
- winter protection, and how to increase the hardiness of grapes
- creating your own new varieties
Natural Gardening in Small Spaces
Book Description With the growing recognition that a wisely and sensitively planted garden has a lot to offer to wildlife and the food web, more and more people are looking for ways to make their gardens environmentally friendly. However, gardeners have tended to assume that to create habitats for wildlife, and evoke wild and natural places, you need a lot of space. In Natural Gardening in Small Spaces, renowned plantsman Noel Kingsbury refutes that presumption, showing how even in a small garden you can create a sustainable ecosystem that looks great --- and, once established, largely looks after itself.
The New Organic Grower:
A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener
Book Description: With more than 45,000 sold since 1988, The New Organic Grower has become a modern classic. In this newly revised and expanded edition, master grower Eliot Coleman continues to present the simplest and most sustainable ways of growing top-quality organic vegetables. Coleman updates practical information on marketing the harvest, on small-scale equipment, and on farming and gardening for the long-term health of the soil. The new book is thoroughly updated, and includes all-new chapters such as:
- Farm-Generated Fertility-how to meet your soil-fertility needs from the resources of your own land, even if manure is not available.
- The Moveable Feast-how to construct home-garden and commercial-scale greenhouses that can be easily moved to benefit plants and avoid insect and disease build-up.
- The Winter Garden-how to plant, harvest, and sell hardy salad crops all winter long from unheated or minimally heated greenhouses.
- Pests?-how to find "plant-positive" rather than "pest-negative" solutions by growing healthy, naturally resistant plants.
- The Information Resource-how and where to learn what you need to know to grow delicious organic vegetables, no matter where you live.
Written for the serious gardener or small market farmer, The New Organic Grower proves that, in terms of both efficiency and profitability, smaller can be better.
Organic Futures
The Case for Organic Farming
Book Description: Organic Futures presents an overwhelming argument for replacing modern farming methods with organic techniques. Exploring the history, politics, and practicalities of organic farming, Adrian Myers shows how the current techniques of agriculture and horticulture—based on chemical fertilizers that inevitably bring about the deterioration of soil life—cannot provide a longterm sustainable future for humankind.
This Organic Life
Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader
Book Description: Joan Dye Gussow is an extraordinarily ordinary woman. She lives in a home not unlike the average home in a neighborhood that is, more or less, typically suburban. What sets her apart from the rest of us is that she thinks more deeply--and in more eloquent detail--about food. In sharing her ponderings, she sets a delightful example for those of us who seek the healthiest, most pleasurable lifestyle within an environment determined to propel us in the opposite direction. Joan is a suburbanite with a green thumb, with a feisty, defiant spirit and a relentlessly positive outlook.
At the heart of This Organic Life is the premise that locally grown food eaten in season makes sense economically, ecologically, and gastronomically. Transporting produce to New York from California--not to mention Central and South America, Australia, or Europe--consumes more energy in transit than it yields in calories. (It costs 435 fossil fuel calories to fly a 5-calorie strawberry from California to New York.) Add in the deleterious effects of agribusiness, such as the endless cycle of pesticide, herbicide, and chemical fertilizers; the loss of topsoil from erosion of over-tilled croplands; depleted aquifers and soil salinization from over-irrigation; and the arguments in favor of "this organic life" become overwhelmingly convincing.
Joan's story is funny and fiery as she points out the absurdities we have unthinkingly come to accept. You won't find an electric can opener in this woman's house. In fact, you probably won't find many cans, as Joan has discovered ways to nourish herself, literally and spiritually, from her own backyard. If you are looking for a tale of courage and independence in a setting that is entirely familiar, read her story.
The Organic Gardener's Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control:
A Complete Problem-Solving Guide to Keeping Your Garden and Yard Healthy Without Chemicals
Book Description: End your worries about garden problems with safe, effective solutions from The Organic Gardener's Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control!* Easy-to-use problem-solving encyclopedia covers more than 200 vegetables, fruits, herbs, flowers, trees, and shrubs* Complete directions on how, when, and where to use preventive methods, insect traps and barriers, biocontrols, homemade remedies, botanical insecticides, and more*
More than 350 color photos for quick identification of insect pests, beneficial insects, and plant diseasesNewly revised with the latest, safest organic controls. A New York Times Best Gardening Book.
Organic Gardening
The Natural No-Dig Way
Book Description: Based on his experience of a system of permanent slightly-raised beds, author Charles Dowding takes you through a delicious variety of fruit and vegetables: what to choose, when to plant and harvest, and how best to avoid pests and diseases. Organic Gardening includes recipes to inspire you to culinary heights with your fresh-picked produce.
Dowding shares his philosophy, tips, and techniques that have enabled him to run a successful organic garden that has supplied local restaurants and shops for 25 years. Encouraging readers to forget the rules, Dowding suggests gardeners will better understand what is going on in your soil, plants, garden, and climate when you develop your own methods of gardening. Most radically, Dowding illustrates a method for ensuring that you never need to till your soil again, instead relying upon the natural balance that comes with respecting life, spreading good compost, and allowing worms to play a key role in your maintenance.
The Organic Lawn Care Manual
Book Description: In the modern suburban landscape, beautiful, green lawns are perhaps the most ubiquitous feature of all. It’s difficult to imagine a friendly neighborhood without broad, clean stretches of neatly shorn grass. More and more in recent years, those lawns are evolving into organic systems as homeowners — concerned about the long-term effects of chemicals on their children, their pets, and the environment — turn to natural methods to keep their yards healthy and inviting, and, yes, still green and lush, too.
Paul Tukey, a self-confessed mowing addict, answers the growing demand for organic grass with a comprehensive volume of natural lawncare information. Step by step, he takes readers through the many elements that work together to form a healthy, organic lawn. Well-treated soil, fed properly with compost and natural fertilizers, is the foundation of every great lawn. Plant it with a grass cultivar matched properly to the climate and sunlight, nourish the soil and grass with the proper amount of water, and maintain the height with a good mower equipped with a sharp blade. A beautiful, naturally maintained lawn can be as simple as that.
An organic, healthy lawn is the best defense against weeds and pests, but when unwanted visitors creep in, Tukey is ready with Weed and Thug ID Guides and advice on dispatching them naturally or learning to live with the benign offenders. Tukey also provides helpful advice for lawnkeepers making the transition from a synthetic to an organic lawn system. It’s all here — everything today’s homeowner needs to keep his lawn off drugs, and make it an inviting living and play area for the whole family.
About the Author: Paul Tukey is the founding editor and publisher of People, Places & Plants magazine. He is co-host with Roger Swain of the television show People, Places & Plants on HGTV and the winner of the American Horticultural Society’s Communicator of the Year for 2006. He lives in Falmouth, Maine.
Planting Green Roofs and Living Walls
Book Description: Planting on roofs and walls is one of the most innovative and fast-developing fields within horticulture and the built environment. This authoritative book explores the very latest roof and wall greening techniques.
The environmental benefits of roof greening are now widely understood including their value in reducing pollution and run-off, insulating against heat and cold, and reducing the maintenance needs of buildings. Modern building construction allows a dovetailing of plants, buildings, and people, hitherto impossible with older technologies, sparking a surge of interest.
Planting Green Roofs and Living Walls describes the historical development of both large-scale commercial and small domestic examples from all over the world. It also provides an introduction to the practical techniques required for constructing green roofs including weight-bearing considerations, materials, substrates, draining layers, modular systems, and plants. A chapter devoted to planting considers plant choice in some depth and outlines key characteristics that make certain plants suitable for the extreme conditions encountered on roofs: drought, high light intensity, and wind.
Planting on walls requires completely different techniques. The book explores both façade greening, where plants grow up steel structures pinned to the wall, and living walls, where plants either establish themselves in the wall itself or are able to survive independently on the wall structure without rooting.
With climate and environmental concerns increasingly in the public eye, this informative book answers all the technical questions and will inspire gardeners, architects, environmentalists, and home maintenance enthusiasts to incorporate green roofs and walls in their forthcoming projects.
Practical Science for Gardeners
Book Description: Informative and entertaining, this book will stimulate experimentation and encourage gardeners to review and improve their current gardening practices. Once gardeners learn how plants are constructed, it is easier to envision how they’ll grow and flourish. An understanding of the structure behind good, healthy soil gives clues as to how to improve one’s own garden tilth. This practical guide helps readers identify what plants need to survive and how these fundamental scientific facts are at the heart of good plant care. A chapter on seeds and germination will encourage gardeners at any level to try their hand at propagation, while discussion of soil, pests, and diseases adds to the skills of all gardeners. The final sections of the book take a closer look at biodiversity, ecology, genetic engineering, and nomenclature. For the enthusiastic beginner or the master gardener, Practical Science for Gardeners unravels the mysterious inner life of plants.
Rodale's All-New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening:
The Indispensable Resource for Every Gardener
Book Description: Over 400 entries of the most practical, up-to-date gardening information ever, collected from garden experts and writers nationwide!"Gardens are places to renew yourself in mind and body, to reawaken to the truth and beauty of the natural world, and to feel the life force inside and around you. And the organic way to garden is safer, cheaper, and more satisfying. Organic gardeners have shown that it's possible to have pleasant and productive gardens in every part of this country without using toxic chemicals. They make their home grounds an island of purity."--Robert Rodale
Rodale's Illustrated Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening
Book Description: Whether an experienced gardener is looking to go organic or a beginner wants to create a healthy, eco-friendly garden, the Rodale's Illustrated Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening contains the tips and techniques needed to produce beautiful flowers, top-quality herbs, and appetizing, wholesome fruits and vegetables. Explore the latest methods for cultivation without chemicals, discover the benefits of composting, and learn how to maintain an organic garden year-round.
Teaming with Microbes
A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web
A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web
Book Description: Smart gardeners know that soil is anything but an inert substance. Healthy soil is teeming with life — not just earthworms and insects, but a staggering multitude of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms. When we use chemical fertilizers, we injure the microbial life that sustains healthy plants, and thus become increasingly dependent on an arsenal of artificial substances, many of them toxic to humans as well as other forms of life. But there is an alternative to this vicious circle: to garden in a way that strengthens, rather than destroys, the soil food web — the complex world of soil-dwelling organisms whose interactions create a nurturing environment for plants. By eschewing jargon and overly technical language, the authors make the benefits of cultivating the soil food web available to a wide audience, from devotees of organic gardening techniques to weekend gardeners who simply want to grow healthy, vigorous plants without resorting to chemicals.
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