Gaia's Garden: Backyard Permaculture

A complete, user friendly guide to permaculture gardening

Gaia's Garden has become my favorite gardening book. It's a complete, user friendly guide to backyard permaculture - organic, sustainable, ecologically sound agriculture scaled to the small holding.

Last summer I attended a workshop on sustainable agriculture. The whole thing was lifted word for word, complete with illustrations, from Gaia's Garden. The people giving the workshop knew it doesn't get any better than this, so why not go straight to the source!

Written in a non-technical, story-telling style, Gaia's Garden leads you from the concept of the garden as eco-system, from theory through practice, using examples, illustrations, techniques and tables of information for support. Author Toby Hemenway is supremely practical, balancing the ideal with the real. He says, "I'd much rather see gardeners consume some nonrenewable resources to create eventually self-sustaining gardens than have them sit paralyzed by the fear of committing an environmentally incorrect act."

A Few Things I've Picked Up From Gaia's Garden:

• The Zone System - how to use every square inch of your yard to grow food
• Natural Patterns - abandoning the straight and narrow
• Sheet Mulching - letting the creatures who live in the soil build the soil
• Cover Crops - when, what, where, how and why
• Polycultural Gardening - inviting other species to live in your yard and help you garden
• Garden Guilds - the effortless way to grow lovely organic fruit with natural plant communities
• Tables of complete information on every kind of useful plant you could ever want, a glossary, bibliograpy, and resource list, and much more.

If you can only buy one gardening book, let it be Gaia's garden. I haven't bought it yet, I just get it out of the library often, and have it pretty much memorized.

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