Think and Grow Food! … reviewed by Vanessa

True wealth is in our soil. If you want to grow rich with organic produce, these titles can help you get down to work. Written by the editors of the Rodale Gardening Books series, Garden Wisdom & Know-How: Everything You Need To Know To Plant, Grow, and Harvest is a large, floppy book (similar to the Whole Earth Catalogs from the 70s) packed with information on soils, plants and garden design as well as tips on composting, buying seeds and organic pest control. Gaia’s Garden: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture by Portland, Oregon-based urban farmer Toby Hemenway includes information on designing your garden as an ecosystem. Learn how to catch, conserve and use water, use certain plants to control aggressive weeds, and grow a food forest. Gaia’s Garden includes information on both rural and urban farming.

Agricultural journalist Ann Larkin Hansen’s Organic Farming Manual is an excellent book on starting and running a sustainable business. With contributions from more than twenty farmers around the US, the Organic Farming Manual offers a short history of organic agriculture followed by chapters on finding farm-able land, assessing soil quality, planting and maintaining an orchard, raising livestock and selling farm produce.

Looking ahead, Year Around Harvest: Winter Gardening On The Coast, written by Victoria area farmer Linda Gilkeson, features lots of valuable tips on growing hearty greens and root vegetables over the winter. Other topics covered include the storing and preserving of fruit and vegetables and the storing and saving seeds.

Organic Gardening Magazine … reviewed by Vanessa

Next month, the long-running Organic Gardening magazine will be celebrating its 70th anniversary.

Yep, that’s right … Organic Gardening was not the by-product of hippies and communes after all, but instead, was a pioneering sustainable living publication dating back to the Second World War when Victory Gardens could be found all over North America and in the United Kingdom.

Organic Gardening was founded by the late J. I. Rodale who, as a well as being an organic farmer, was the founder of the publishing company Rodale, Inc. (since 1930, originally as Rodale Press) and the Rodale Institute (since 1947); he also wrote prolifically on numerous subjects.

Commemorate Earth Day by having a gander at the first issue ever (May 1942) of what was then known as Organic Farming and Gardening. Then, come by the library to check out how far this hallowed herald of holism (not bad, huh?) has come.

Happy Earth Day!

Apples and Miracles … reviewed by Vanessa

Good food can be a great excuse to travel anywhere: fresh, local organic food even more so. These two books take you on the (back country) road to eating off the land all the while learning, or better yet re-learning, about where our food comes from and what it truly can cost to get it to us.

Margaret Webb’s Apples to Oysters: A Food Lover’s Tour of Canadian Farms is charming in that the book is set-up like a menu. Part One, “Appetizers”, deals entirely with seafood, or as one of the chapters is called, “The Salad from the Sea.” Part Two, entitled “Mains”, includes “Newfoundland and Labrador: For the Love of Cod” and “Manitoba: Going Whole Hog” while in Part Three, “To Finish”, readers can end their “meal” with “British Columbia: An Apple Is Not an Apple”, “Quebec: C’est Cheese” and “Ontario: A Midwinter Night’s Dream”. Along the way, Webb relays some interesting data (the historical statistics of oyster fishing off the shores of Prince Edward Island), entertaining anecdotes and delicious recipes (Yukon Gold Fries).

In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, novelist Barbara Kingsolver takes her family, and us, back to the land for a down-to-earth eating experience. Kingsolver’s first nonfiction book (published in 2007), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a calendar year of rural culinary delights; the book takes you from early spring (“Waiting for Asparagus: Late March”) through summer (“Eating Neighborly: Late June”), autumn (“Smashing Pumpkins: October”) and winter (“What Do You Eat in January?” and “Hungry Month: February-March”): a complete cycle. This is contrasted with facts from the mainstream industrial food system making you wish that the year of food life that Kingsolver describes would stretch out like the rustic farm landscape in the book … forever.

And we hope to harvest your comments below!

A Second Bushel of Fresh Reads … reviewed by Jason

Everything’s coming up books! Urban farming books, that is. It seems every month there’s a new crop. Here are another four such titles for those new to the food security movement.

Every movement has its manifesto and Maria Rodale, granddaughter of modern organic agriculture pioneer J. I. Rodale, outlines hers in the form of Organic Manifesto: How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe. After spending the first two-thirds of the book listing the impacts of chemical pesticides and herbicides on the environment and on ourselves, Rodale describes the healing benefits of modern organic farming and outlines “Five Solutions That Might Save Us”: governments need to ban agricultural chemicals and GMOs, farmers need to supply the organic demand, businesses need to create innovative solutions, economists need to measure strength, not growth, and everyone needs to demand organic.

Canadian Sarah Elton presents Locavore: From Farmers’ Fields to Rooftop Gardens: How Canadians are Changing The Way We Eat, an exploring of the movement in Canada. Elton zeroes in on farms, farmers, chefs and others involved, coast-to-coast, in the push to change our food system and culture one meal at a time. Likewise, City Farmer: Adventures in Urban Food Growing by Toronto-based farmer Lorraine Johnson explores community gardens and food security projects throughout North America.

Many may have heard the apocryphal Einstein quote about human beings going extinct four years after the bees do. The quote has never been substantiated, but it’s clear much of life depends on the work of these creatures. If beekeeping is an ailing art in need of resuscitation, then York University biology professor Laurence Packer’s book Keeping The Bees is our first aid kit. Subtitled “Why All Bees are At Risk and What We Can Do To Save Them,” Packer’s book is a great introduction to the world of bees and the vital role they play in sustaining plant and animal (including human) life. However, for actual beekeeping techniques one may need to consult more practical titles such as Howland Blackiston’s Beekeeping for Dummies and Beekeeping: A Practical Guide for The Novice Beekeeper by Werner Melzer.

“Grow Where You Can” might as well be the title of Gayla Trail’s latest guerilla gardening guide. Actually entitled Grow Great Grub: Organic Food for Small Spaces, Trail (also author of You Grow Girl!) covers apartment and suburban food gardens as well as rooftops and other tight spots. And with these titles, go forth and garden!

Get the first bushel here!

Do you garden (or farm)? Plant your comments below!