Gardening When It Counts

“Shows us how to garden like our ancestors gardened . . . with just four basic hand tools, and with little or no electricity or irrigation.” —Carol Deppe, author of The Resilient Gardener In hard times, the family can be greatly helped by growing a highly productive food garden, requiring little cash outlay or watering. 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 wastewater, perhaps two hundred dollars’ worth of hand tools. Gardening When It Counts helps readers rediscover traditional low-input gardening methods to produce healthy food. Currently popular intensive vegetable gardening methods are largely inappropriate to the new circumstances we find ourselves in. Crowded raised beds require high inputs of water, fertility and organic matter, and demand large amounts of human time and effort. 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. Designed for readers with no experience and applicable to most areas in the English-speaking world except the tropics and hot deserts, Gardening When It Counts is inspiring increasing numbers of North Americans to achieve some measure of backyard food self-sufficiency. “Delightfully informative and abundantly rich with humor and grandfatherly wisdom. A must-read for anyone wanting a feast off the land of their own making.” —Elaine Smitha, host of the “Evolving Ideas” cable talk show and author of If You Make the Rules, How Come You’re Not Boss?

“It is bold, it is courageous, and it challenges many of our preconceptions about food, about soils, about farming, and about health.” —Michael Ableman, farmer, author of Farm the City To grow produce of the highest nutritional quality, the essential minerals lacking in our soil from intensive agriculture must be replaced. The Intelligent Gardener is the practical, step-by-step guide for any serious gardener who wants to: · Demystify this process · Debunk much of the false and misleading information perpetuated by both the conventional and organic agricultural movements · Re-mineralize our soil. Accompanied with customizable web-based spreadsheets, this toolkit calls for far more attention to detail than the simple addition of composted manure or NPK fertilizers. It conclusively establishes the link between healthy soil, healthy food, and healthy people. Vegetables, fruits, and grains are a major source of vital nutrients, but centuries of intensive agriculture have depleted our soils to historic lows. As a result, the broccoli you consume today may have less than half the vitamins and minerals that the equivalent serving would have contained a hundred years ago. This is a matter of serious concern, since poor nutrition has been linked to myriad health problems including cancer, heart disease, obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes. For optimum health we must increase the nutrient density of our foods to the levels enjoyed by previous generations. The Intelligent Gardener goes beyond organic—it offers the essential tools for those who care about the quality of the produce they grow. “It’s hard to imagine this book not having a significant and lasting impact on the way organic farmers and gardeners grow their crops.” —Mark McDonald, West Coast Seeds

The book was created by a gardener who was challenged with a lack of water in the dry season. Aiming to grow a 5-acre garden and have his own vegetables and fruit, the farmer invented numerous ways to keep the soil humid in the dry season.

Scientist/gardener Carol Deppe combines her passion for organic gardening with newly emerging scientific information from many fields — resilience science, climatology, climate change, ecology, anthropology, paleontology, sustainable agriculture, nutrition, health, and medicine. In the last half of The Resilient Gardener, Deppe extends and illustrates these principles with detailed information about growing and using five key crops: potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and eggs. In this book you’ll learn how to: •Garden in an era of unpredictable weather and climate change •Grow, store, and use more of your own staple crops •Garden efficiently and comfortably (even if you have a bad back) •Grow, store, and cook different varieties of potatoes and save your own potato seed •Grow the right varieties of corn to make your own gourmet-quality fast-cooking polenta, cornbread, parched corn, corn cakes, pancakes and even savory corn gravy •Make whole-grain, corn-based breads and cakes using the author’s original gluten-free recipes involving no other grains, artificial binders, or dairy products •Grow and use popbeans and other grain legumes •Grow, store, and use summer, winter, and drying squash •Keep a home laying flock of ducks or chickens; integrate them with your gardening, and grow most of their feed. The Resilient Gardener is both a conceptual and a hands-on organic gardening book, and is suitable for vegetable gardeners at all levels of experience. Resilience here is broadly conceived and encompasses a full range of problems, from personal hard times such as injuries, family crises, financial problems, health problems, and special dietary needs (gluten intolerance, food allergies, carbohydrate sensitivity, and a need for weight control) to serious regional and global disasters and climate change. It is a supremely optimistic as well as realistic book about how resilient gardeners and their vegetable gardens can flourish even in challenging times and help their communities to survive and thrive through everything that comes their way — from tomorrow through the next thousand years. Organic gardening, vegetable gardening, self-sufficiency, subsistence gardening, gluten-free living.

Early and late frosts, arctic winds, and inhospitable terrain are just a few of the obstacles facing those who garden in the colder regions of North America. Author Lewis Hill has spent a lifetime gardening in northern Vermont, and his system for how to garden more and better in a short growing season is thoroughly covered in this comprehensive guide. With Cold-Climate Gardening, gardeners in cold regions will discover how to grow more food, landscape more effectively, protect vulnerable plantings, warm up the soil earlier, choose species that will thrive, and much more.