| | |  | Organic | Home » » » » » » Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture | | | | | | | Description: | | Permaculture is a verbal marriage of “permanent” and “agriculture.” Australian Bill Mollison pioneered its development. Key features include:
use of compatible perennials;
non-invasive planting techniques;
emphasis on biodiversity;
specifically adaptable to local climate, landscape, and soil conditions;
highly productive output of edibles.
Now, picture your backyard as one incredibly lush garden, filled with edible flowers, bursting with fruit and berries, and carpeted with scented herbs and tangy salad greens. The visual impact is of Monet’s palette, a wash of color, texture, and hue. But this is no still life. The flowers nurture endangered pollinators. Bright-featured songbirds feed on abundant berries and gather twigs for their nests.
The plants themselves are grouped in natural communities, where each species plays a role in building soil, deterring pests, storing nutrients, and luring beneficial insects. And finally, you--good ol’ homo sapiens--are an integral part of the scene. Your garden tools are resting against a nearby tree, and have a slight patina of rust, because this garden requires so little maintenance. You recline into a hammock to admire your work. You have created a garden paradise.
This is no dream, but rather an ecological garden, which takes the principles of permaculture and applies them on a home-scale. There is nothing technical, intrusive, secretive, or expensive about this form of gardening. All that is required is some botanical knowledge (which is in this book) and a mindset that defines a backyard paradise as something other than a carpet of grass fed by MiracleGro. | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Toby Hemenway | | Paperback:
| 240 pages | | Publisher:
| Chelsea Green | | Publication Date:
| April 01, 2001 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1890132527 | | Package Length:
| 9.8 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.9 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.7 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.25 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 45 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
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now in a 2nd edition...May 10, 2009
(which amazon sells but doesn't link to here on the purchasing options, perhaps due to the different ISBN: 1603580298 - fyi. it's got a whole new chapter, which this review does not reflect [remember, that's a different book with a different ISBN...])
I've read the whole book, and am rereading it now (seeing as it's about that time of year). 'Gaia's Garden' provides a wide arrange of topics and tactics regarding edible home landscaping, be they swales (methods of water absorbtion into the ground), chicken tractors, companion planting (with a few great and extended examples, much better detailed than I've seen in any other book yet), beneficiaries, and more. It's been a long while since I've read it entirely through, but I still recall feeling, at least towards the end, that many of the points were being weakly reiterated (at least in comparison to earlier in the book), somewhat tied together, but that they didn't really add too much to the whole of the book. Again, it's been a while, and this second reading may provide a contrary perspective.
Nonetheless, seeing as I've yet to encounter another book which covers half as much, that gives great examples of such, and a number of tables of plants for various uses, then don't forget about the good writing and lots of real world examples, and 'Gaia's Garden' still receives five stars by the likes of me.
p.s. 'Edible Forest Gardens' is also great (at least the first volume, wading through the second more technical one now), which I purchased with Gaia's Garden, and glad both were bought -- one is primarily about tree crops, and not so much in the way of utilizing annual garden vegetables (rightfully so, as Toensmeier has put out since then another book, 'Perennial Vegetables' [look it up on Chelsea Green's website, there's a good 10+ minutes of video with the author going through his garden, showing off some of the diversity of his perennial veg]), whereas Hemenway's book does cover annuals to some extent, with no less than two examples of good polycultures of them (extended throughout the season, even).
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
 Old Idea... new to me!Jan 21, 2009
I found this book to be a delightfully inspirational blend of stories, facts and a common sense approach to the home garden environment, although, I would not use this book as a definitive "how to guide".
I think this books main value is in its provocative manner. I read it, and two weeks later have started a plethora of mini permaculture experiments. I searched around my home to find my "micro-environments" and have started to identify my "weeds" to see what they can tell me about my soil conditions. I even found a "weed" growing plentifully in my backyard, was actually an herb!
I recommend this book especially for those new or just beginning to explore the wide world of the home garden.
Great ReadDec 22, 2008
I haven't made my way through the whole book yet, but what a great start - good organization, fabulous ideas and examples, nice mix of philosophy and method, more than ample motivation and inspiration to start my own food forest!
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Eye-OpeningDec 06, 2008
Maybe I'm naive and uninformed, but I found this book eye-opening. I did read it a couple years ago now, but its ideas and principles were fascinating to me. Much of what it recommends, I was already doing, because most of my gardening techniques come from foggy memories of my grandmothers and their gardens. Because both my grandmothers were pretty poor (dirt poor?), they couldn't afford pesticides or herbicides or irrigation or manicured lawns. So, they built up beautiful gardens with crush planting and recycling of resources and careful siting of particular plants. They knew their space and their plants, and they never wasted anything. I try to do what they did and expand on it through what I can learn from books. This book gave me a lot in terms of principles for what I do and why I do it. What I maybe understood on an intuitive level or didn't understand at all but just did, this book provided a foundation for and then built further on that foundation. I'm always in search of more books of this type -- that address how a home-owner can use some of the principles of permaculture and ideas for minimizing work and human input in the garden through more "natural" methods of gardening. Too few books seem to try to tackle such issues on a small scale for single homes. This book was a great start. So, if you didn't have grandmothers like mine but you're interested in learning how to make the most of your garden with the least human input, start with this book.
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
got my money's worth in one season, for just one technique from this bookSep 09, 2008
The Library journal review does a huge disservice to this book.
Imagine a beautiful, highly productive, virtually weed-free,
drought-resistant, inexpensive, low-maintenance and ecologically sound
garden bed in your yard. It sounds impossible, but it is very simple
and only requires a few hours to create this fall, no digging required.
You can put to use the bounty of leaves and/or pine needles that are
provided for free to almost every suburbanite in the fall. This
is the ideal time, as the bed is better if it can break down over the
winter.
I have been gardening for about 25 years, and wish had I had heard of
this method sooner. It is perfect, especially for those who are not
physically able to dig, till or do a lot of weeding or simply have very
little time for gardening.
It involves piling up and wetting down 8 -12 inches of layers of
organic matter (we used leaves and some manure) on top of a thin layer
of newspapers or cardboard, with a small amount of amendments such as
greensand, lime and rock phosphate and manure underneath the paper. On
the top is a 1-2 inch layer of mulch (we used white pine needles), to
keep in moisture and suppress weeds. Come spring, you simply push aside
the top mulch and plant seedlings.
This 'sheet mulching' method came from this wonderful book by Toby
Hemenway. We have several sheet mulch beds this
year, and they are outrageously productive. For example, one 4' x 9'
bed in a very sunny spot, contains 6 large tomato plants, 3 sweet
pepper plants, 3 cucumber vines on a trellis, a short row of
sunflowers, one summer squash plant, and 7 winter squash plants. I
find this amazing considering that the ground underneath is very poor,
sandy and barely supported grass.
With apologies to Mae West, I have learned a big lesson, it's not the soil
in your life, it's the life in your soil!
I bought this book in January and have many times over saved the price in
time, mulch and bought amendments using ONLY the sheet mulch idea.
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