Gardening

Community-based initiatives to preserve and protect our food supply

Historically, seed companies were generally small, often family-run businesses. Because they were regionally based, they could focus on varieties well-suited to the local environment. A Pacific Northwest company, for example, would specialize in different cultivars than a company based in the Southeast. However the absorption of these small, independent seed businesses into large multinationals, combined with the advancement of biotechnology resulting in hybrids and GMO seeds, has led to a serious loss of genetic diversity. The public is now at the mercy of the corporations that control the seeds.

In the past few years, gardeners have realized the inherent danger in this situation. A growing movement is striving to preserve and expand our stock of heritage and heirloom varieties through seed saving and sharing opportunities. Seed Libraries is a practical guide to saving seeds through community programs, including:

• Step-by-step instructions for setting up a seed library
• A wealth of ideas to help attract patrons and keep the momentum going
• Profiles of existing libraries and other types of seed saving partnerships

Whoever controls the seeds controls the food supply. By empowering communities to preserve and protect the genetic diversity of their harvest, Seed Libraries is the first step towards reclaiming our self-reliance while enhancing food security and ensuring that the future of food is healthy, vibrant, tasty, and nutritious.

Cindy Conner is a permaculture educator, founder of Homeplace Earth and producer of two popular instructional gardening DVDs. She is also the author of Grow a Sustainable Diet .

Row by row - maximize your harvest and feed your soil by developing a customized plan for your garden

Everyone loves to prepare a meal with ingredients fresh from their own garden. But for most of us, no matter how plentiful our harvest, homegrown produce comprises only a fraction of what we eat. And while many gardening guides will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about individual crops, few tackle the more involved task of helping you maximize the percentage of your diet you grow yourself.

Grow a Sustainable Diet will help you develop a comprehensive, customized garden plan to produce the maximum number of calories and nutrients from any available space. Avoid arriving in August buried under a mountain of kale or zucchini (and not much else) by making thoughtful choices at the planning stage, focusing on dietary staples and key nutrients. Learn how to calculate:

• Which food and cover crops are best for your specific requirements
• How many seeds and plants of each variety you should sow
• What and when to plant, harvest and replant for maximum yield.

Focusing on permaculture principles, biointensive gardening methods, getting food to the table with minimum fossil fuel input, and growing crops that sustain both you and your soil, this complete guide is a must-read for anyone working toward food self-sufficiency for themselves or their family.

“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?

Grow fresh fish and vegetables together in a closed-loop system that uses 90% less water than traditional gardening. Step-by-step guide to building home aquaponics systems that provide year-round food production in small spaces while recycling nutrients naturally.

Why Aquaponics Works Better Than Separate Systems:

Fish waste provides perfect nutrition for plants, while plants clean the water for fish. This symbiotic relationship eliminates the need for soil, reduces water usage dramatically, and produces both protein and vegetables simultaneously.

What You'll Build:

• Home-scale systems designed for families wanting fresh food year-round
• Fish and plant combinations that thrive together in closed-loop environments
• Simple maintenance routines requiring just 10-15 minutes daily
• Troubleshooting guides for water chemistry, fish health, and plant nutrition
• Expansion strategies for scaling up successful systems over time

Home Production Results:

Families report producing 50-100 pounds of vegetables plus 20-50 pounds of fish annually from systems occupying just 50-100 square feet of space.

Grow both dinner and the main course in one integrated system. Perfect for urban gardeners, sustainability enthusiasts, and families wanting fresh, local food security.

Aesthetic Arrangements for the Artsy Minimalist

#1 New Release in Folkcrafts, Japanese Gardens, Botany of Flowers, and Architectural Photography

Discover modern Ikebana, the Japanese art of floral design, to form and cultivate internal peace and creativity. You can create minimalist decor with Ikebana, otherwise known as Kado, a disciplined art form that brings together nature and the inner self through flower arrangement.

Delight in the intentionally minimalist floral designs. Perfect for anyone interested in historic culture, flower arranging, Japanese art, or minimalist decorating. This beautifully-photographed instructional guide is a modern take on a centuries-old art. It's filled with simple-to-follow, step-by-step instructions that allow you to create stunning decor and learn how to make floral arrangements in various Ikebana styles using both fresh and dried flowers.

The history of Kado, reimagined. Ikebana is a long-practiced, much respected artform with an intriguing history, and author Naoko Zaima is excited to share the story with you in this lovely Japanese art book and floral design book.

Inside, you’ll find:

• Alluring simplistic design inspirations and pictures of Ikebana
• Stories featuring the history of Ikebana and its impact on floral design through history
• How to make everything Kado—from floral bouquets to wreaths and more—accompanied by suggestions of the best flower arrangement tools to use for each project

If you liked elevated arrangement books like Floret Farm's A Year in Flowers, Marie Kondo's Kurashi at Home, or Inspired by Nature, you’ll love Inspired Ikebana.

Write Beautifully with the Flourish and Bloom Journal

Do you take the time to stop and smell the roses? Get your daily dose of blossoms and blooms with a stylish and fresh lined journal for your notes. Featuring Nikki Irving’s beautiful flower photography, buds, and petals, this writing journal adds floral fun to your day!

The perfect journal for flower lovers. The Flourish and Bloom Journal is a multi-purpose tool for unleashing your thoughts, to-do lists, recipes, study notes, doodles, and floral sightings. This book is a must-have for on-the-go writing, notes, or diary keeping.

Modern pages for lovers of roses, lilies, peonies, and violets. With this cute flower journal of petals, blossoms, and buds, pages are transformed into inspired creations. Its vibrantly illustrated Demask flexcover, high-quality cream paper, and lay-flat binding make it perfect for everyday outings and comfortable reading and writing.

With the Flourish and Bloom Journal, you can do anything, including:

• Keeping to-do lists, recipes, study notes, and more 
• Serving your creative needs 
• Brightening up your day with peonies, lilies, violets, and roses

If you’re looking for stationery supplies, notebooks for studying, recipe books to write in, or vintage journals—like Moleskin, Peter Pauper Press, or Rifle Paper Co journals—then you’ll love Flourish and Bloom Journal.

100 Ideas, Crafts, and How-Tos for Gardeners

"… packed with DIY ideas and ways to garden no matter how big or small your home or yard is." —Ask Away Blog

A gardening book filled with DIY projects, wisdom, and joy

Awakening the gardener in all of us. Gardening allows us to live in a much more human way, grounded in nature and connected to Mother Earth and all she provides. Even if your garden is just a hanging basket of cherry tomatoes or a windowsill filled with herb pots, you will still reap the benefits of gardening.

DIY crafting and gardening. Gardening adds pleasure to your life and gives you a sense of calm. With your garden, you are quite literally growing a bounty of blessings. Lifelong gardener and bestselling author Becca Anderson has put her love of crafting and of gardening together in this book of inspired DIY ideas.

More than a gardening book. Along with gardening tips and secrets for growing flowers, herbs and veggies, Anderson shares dozens of how-tos in this delightful guide to making candles, potpourri, bath salts, essential oils, floral waters, tinctures, liquors, pickles jams and even fountains, birdhouses and fairy doors. The perfect gift for any gardener!

Inside learn:

• Time-tested gardening secrets
• How to garden in big and small spaces
• Recipes for home-grown vegetables and fruits
• How to preserve and ferment
  
• How to make DIY garden decorations and fixtures
  
• Anderson’s own gardening stories that will inspire, motivate, and lift the spirit

If you are a fan of books like Do-It-Yourself Garden Projects and Crafts, Establishing Home, Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden, Welcome to the Farm, Vogue Living, or Provence Style, you’ll love The Crafty Gardener.

With an increasing awareness of what they eat and the provenance of their food, people nowadays often raise such questions as where does the food come from? How is it produced? This concern over food ingredients and origins has resulted in a burgeoning interest in growing one's own food, both for the satisfaction in having done it oneself and for the assurance of food quality and safety. But how to grow one's own food in the midst of an urban metropolis? How to do it without a real garden?This book points the way, especially for beginners and those who may only have a balcony or a rooftop and are limited to growing in containers. It is not just about gardening in a narrow sense. It delves into the growing of plants as a multidisciplinary activity involving not only botany, but also zoology, geology, meteorology, philosophy, ornithology, and more. The book sends a strong environmental message for a reevaluation of modern lifestyle.

This book introduces the methods, ingredients, and delights of urban home gardening for beginners as well as avid gardeners interested in growing healthy, organic, and tasty food. Appealing to those who have access to garden, balcony, and rooftop spaces and to those who grow vegetables in containers, this expanded second edition includes new photographs and updated material showing how to nurture and harvest avocados, chayote, dill, dragon fruit, and pak choi. Arthur van Langenberg also offers hands-on recipes for transforming home-grown natural ingredients into delicious dishes and sauces, including Macanese sweet potato pudding, fig syrup, and green tomato chutney.

A conversation between an artist and a gardener in the California border-landscape about creation, change, and loss.

An intertextual, fictionalized narrative weaves together several years of Mexican artist Erick Meyenberg’s observations, research, video recordings, and paintings based on logbooks kept by gardener Chris Shea. Meyenberg’s conversations with Shea about his ephemeral landscape infer the change and loss inherent in human life and propels the deep emotional intelligence of this bilingual book as it reflects on time, creation, and the inspiration of the natural world. Shea’s remarkable, nuanced, and delicate language for color is reflected in Meyenberg’s layered appreciation for the garden Shea tended until the end of his life. Eloisa Haudenschild, Director of inSite, commissioned Meyenberg’s project with Shea for haudenschildGarage in La Jolla, California, and enlisted curator Ruth Estévez, the text’s author.

For more information about the project see the haudenschildGarage website or DoppelHouse.com. Note: This book has two parts, one in English, one in Spanish.

This study examines the agricultural practices and decision-making processes of a small Tai-Lue village in northern Thailand, focusing on the period from 1959 to 1961, with a follow-up visit in 1965. Conducted through anthropological fieldwork, the research involved living among villagers, learning their language, and participating in their daily life. The primary aim was to understand how villagers in Ban Ping made farming decisions, with a specific interest in their adoption of new agricultural technologies, such as tractors, which had significantly changed rice cultivation by 1960. By concentrating on the local, culturally-informed perspectives of the villagers, the study seeks to provide insights into the factors that influence farming choices within the community.

The analysis explores the complexities of farming decisions through two perspectives: rational decision-making processes related to technology and broader social factors tied to the village’s extracommunity relations. The methodological approach involves a detailed, systematic examination of how decisions were made in 1960, with subsequent insights from the 1965 field trip reserved for the study's final chapter to maintain the integrity of the initial analysis. By doing so, the research attempts to reveal the processes through which farmers select among different agricultural practices, emphasizing the importance of understanding localized decision-making in efforts to improve agricultural development and economic policies.

This work is intended not only for ethnographers studying agricultural practices but also for those involved in economic development, offering a grounded perspective on the technological and social dynamics of rural communities. The study reflects the author's engagement with development work in Thailand, drawing on experiences with various international and Thai organizations. The research benefits from the support of local Thai officials, community members, and academic institutions, whose cooperation made it possible to document the nuanced interactions between tradition, technology, and economic change in Ban Ping.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

Modern Weed Control explores the transformative evolution of weed management from a minor agricultural practice to a cornerstone of contemporary agribusiness. Since its inception in 1942, the field has expanded exponentially, with a growing body of chemists, agronomists, plant physiologists, and researchers contributing to advancements that now span the globe. Herbicides, once a limited toolset, have multiplied to over 200 varieties, with innovations like glyphosate introducing novel mechanisms for combating weeds. This volume underscores how the science of weed control has become integral to modern agricultural strategies, enabling the efficient cultivation of crops to meet the demands of a rapidly growing population.

Amid growing environmental concerns, including pollution and pesticide misuse, Modern Weed Control addresses the increasing regulatory landscape surrounding herbicides. Despite these challenges, the development of selective and environmentally considerate chemicals continues, reflecting the resilience and adaptability of agricultural science. The book also highlights innovative solutions such as integrated applications combining herbicides, insecticides, and fertilizers, underscoring agriculture's dynamic efforts to sustain productivity. As a comprehensive resource, this text captures the advancements, challenges, and future directions of weed control, offering essential insights for agronomists, policymakers, and environmental advocates alike.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

Grow your way to happiness with this practical handbook for a more sustainable life.

Whether you have a large country garden or a small backyard in the city, this essential guide to the ‘Good Life’ will help you on your journey to becoming more self-sufficient – which is something we all need to be thinking about. Climate change, industrial farming with its reliance on chemicals, rising food prices, fears over food security or just a desire to spend more time outdoors – there are many reasons driving people towards homegrown food and self-sufficiency. 

Growing your own fruit and vegetables, preserving your produce and generating your own energy are all covered in this thrifty guide by the original ‘Tom and Barbara’, Eve and Terence McLaughlin, who wrote the first edition of this book in 1979. This information-packed book has expert advice on growing, harvesting, storing and preserving your produce. You can brew your own beer and learn how to bottle, cure, smoke and pickle your produce to make it last longer.

The book features easy-to-follow instructions for DIY tools and equipment to save money, reduce energy consumption and cut back on waste. Learn how to plan your site, explore the best planting times and methods, discover how to grow a variety of vegetables, fruit and nuts, and how to deal with pests and diseases.

As well as growing your own food, the book also covers the basics of keeping livestock – including chickens, ducks, goats and pigs – and how to harness alternative energy sources such as solar and wind power.

Putting your own food on the table and playing your part in creating a more sustainable future is hugely rewarding and also has health benefits – the physical exercise of planting and harvesting, the mental wellness that comes with spending time in nature, and the reduction in chemicals in the food you eat – there is so much in this activity that fosters greater wellbeing.

Whether you're planning a move to full-blown self-sufficiency or are just curious about what's involved and want to take your first steps to growing your own food, this essential guide has everything you need to know.

How home gardeners with limited time and garden space can reclaim the joy and independence of seed saving

Beginning Seed Saving for the Home Gardener explores how seed saving is not only easier than we think, but that it is essential for vibrant, independent, and bountiful gardens.

Many home gardeners refuse to eat a grocery store tomato, but routinely obtain seeds commercially, sometimes from thousands of miles away. And while seed saving can appear mysterious and intimidating, even home gardeners with limited time and space can experience the joy and independence it brings, freeing them from industry and the annual commercial seed order.

Coverage includes:

• Why seed saving belongs in the home garden
• Principles of vegetative and sexual reproduction
• Easy inbreeding plants, including legumes, lettuce, tomatoes, and peppers
• Plants with a few more challenges, including squash, spinach, onions, and parsley
• Brief discussion of more difficult crops, including corn, carrots, and cabbage.

Written by a home seed saver for the home seed saver, Beginning Seed Saving for the Home Gardener is a comprehensive guide for those who want to reclaim our seed heritage, highlighting the importance of saving seeds for you, your neighbors, and most importantly, subsequent generations.