Gaia's Garden

Gaia's Garden PDF

Author: Toby Hemenway

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1603580298

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This extensively revised and expanded edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban gardeners. The text's message is that working with nature, not against it, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens.

The Permaculture City

The Permaculture City PDF

Author: Toby Hemenway

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Published: 2015-07-17

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1603585273

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Permaculture is more than just the latest buzzword; it offers positive solutions for many of the environmental and social challenges confronting us. And nowhere are those remedies more needed and desired than in our cities. The Permaculture City provides a new way of thinking about urban living, with practical examples for creating abundant food, energy security, close-knit communities, local and meaningful livelihoods, and sustainable policies in our cities and towns. The same nature-based approach that works so beautifully for growing food—connecting the pieces of the landscape together in harmonious ways—applies perfectly to many of our other needs. Toby Hemenway, one of the leading practitioners and teachers of permaculture design, illuminates a new way forward through examples of edge-pushing innovations, along with a deeply holistic conceptual framework for our cities, towns, and suburbs. The Permaculture City begins in the garden but takes what we have learned there and applies it to a much broader range of human experience; we’re not just gardening plants but people, neighborhoods, and even cultures. Hemenway lays out how permaculture design can help towndwellers solve the challenges of meeting our needs for food, water, shelter, energy, community, and livelihood in sustainable, resilient ways. Readers will find new information on designing the urban home garden and strategies for gardening in community, rethinking our water and energy systems, learning the difference between a “job” and a “livelihood,” and the importance of placemaking and an empowered community. This important book documents the rise of a new sophistication, depth, and diversity in the approaches and thinking of permaculture designers and practitioners. Understanding nature can do more than improve how we grow, make, or consume things; it can also teach us how to cooperate, make decisions, and arrive at good solutions.

How to Grow More Vegetables, Ninth Edition

How to Grow More Vegetables, Ninth Edition PDF

Author: John Jeavons

Publisher: Ten Speed Press

Published: 2017-07-25

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0399579192

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The world's leading resource on biointensive, sustainable, high-yield organic gardening is thoroughly updated throughout, with new sections on using 12 percent less water and increasing compost power. Long before it was a trend, How to Grow More Vegetables brought backyard ecosystems to life for the home gardener by demonstrating sustainable growing methods for spectacular organic produce on a small but intensive scale. How to Grow More Vegetables has become the go-to reference for food growers at every level, whether home gardeners dedicated to nurturing backyard edibles with minimal water in maximum harmony with nature's cycles, or a small-scale commercial producer interested in optimizing soil fertility and increasing plant productivity. In the ninth edition, author John Jeavons has revised and updated each chapter, including new sections on using less water and increasing compost power.

The Permaculture Home Garden

The Permaculture Home Garden PDF

Author: Linda Woodrow

Publisher: Allen Lane

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 9780670865994

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Inspired by her own training in permaculture, Linda Woodrow has devised a totally integrated organic system of gardening that combines science with common sense. In The Permaculture Home Garden she draws us into a warmly welcoming household where everyone shares the planting, helps to tend the hens, and relaxes after a satisfying day's work. Step-by-step instructions and helpful diagrams make it easy to plan and plant a garden to suit your taste and space - a garden that not only looks wonderful but also yields bountiful fruit, herbs and vegetables.

Epic Tomatoes

Epic Tomatoes PDF

Author: Craig LeHoullier

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2015-01-16

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 1612122094

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Savor your best tomato harvest ever! Craig LeHoullier provides everything a tomato enthusiast needs to know about growing more than 200 varieties of tomatoes, from planting to cultivating and collecting seeds at the end of the season. He also offers a comprehensive guide to various pests and tomato diseases, explaining how best to avoid them. With beautiful photographs and intriguing tomato profiles throughout, Epic Tomatoes celebrates one of the most versatile and delicious crops in your garden.

Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally

Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally PDF

Author: Robert Kourik

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Published: 2005-03-30

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 1603581154

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First published in 1986, this classic is back in print by popular demand. It is the authoritative text on edible landscaping, featuring a step-by-step guide to designing a productive environment using vegetables, fruits, flowers, and herbs for a combination of ornamental and culinary purposes. It includes descriptions of plants for all temperate habitats, methods for improving soil, tree pruning styles, and gourmet recipes using low-maintenance plants. There are sections on attracting beneficial insects with companion plants and using planting to shelter your home from erosion, heat, wind, and cold.

Paradise Lot

Paradise Lot PDF

Author: Eric Toensmeier

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Published: 2013-02-08

Total Pages: 1

ISBN-13: 1603584005

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When Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates moved into a duplex in a run-down part of Holyoke, Massachusetts, the tenth-of-an-acre lot was barren ground and bad soil, peppered with broken pieces of concrete, asphalt, and brick. The two friends got to work designing what would become not just another urban farm, but a "permaculture paradise" replete with perennial broccoli, paw paws, bananas, and moringa—all told, more than two hundred low-maintenance edible plants in an innovative food forest on a small city lot. The garden—intended to function like a natural ecosystem with the plants themselves providing most of the garden's needs for fertility, pest control, and weed suppression—also features an edible water garden, a year-round unheated greenhouse, tropical crops, urban poultry, and even silkworms. In telling the story of Paradise Lot, Toensmeier explains the principles and practices of permaculture, the choice of exotic and unusual food plants, the techniques of design and cultivation, and, of course, the adventures, mistakes, and do-overs in the process. Packed full of detailed, useful information about designing a highly productive permaculture garden, Paradise Lot is also a funny and charming story of two single guys, both plant nerds, with a wild plan: to realize the garden of their dreams and meet women to share it with. Amazingly, on both counts, they succeed.

Bioshelter Market Garden

Bioshelter Market Garden PDF

Author: Darrell Frey

Publisher: New Society Publishers

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 619

ISBN-13: 1550924575

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“This well-illustrated case study . . . will help students of permaculture, of sustainability, of earth regeneration and of integrated eco-social design.” —Prof. Declan Kennedy, Chairman, Advisory Board, gaiauniversity.org To ensure food security and restore the health of the planet, we need to move beyond industrial agriculture and return to the practice of small-scale, local farming. The Bioshelter Market Garden: A Permaculture Farm describes the creation of a sustainable food system through a detailed case study of the successful year-round organic market garden and permaculture design at Pennsylvania’s Three Sisters Farm. At the heart of Three Sisters is its bioshelter—a solar greenhouse which integrates growing facilities, poultry housing, a potting room, storage, kitchen facilities, compost bins, a reference library and classroom area. The Bioshelter Market Garden examines how the bioshelter promotes greater biodiversity and is an energy efficient method of extending crop production through Pennsylvania’s cold winter months. Both visionary and practical, this fully illustrated book contains a wealth of information on the application of permaculture principles. Some of the topics covered include: Design and management of an intensive market garden farm Energy systems and bio-thermal resources Ecological soil management and pest control Wetlands usage Solar greenhouse design and management Whatever your gardening experience and ambitions, this comprehensive manual is sure to inform and inspire. “Darrell Frey’s inspirational book gives you all you need to know to create an energy-saving, food-producing bioshelter . . . [It] covers everything you need to understand, build, or simply admire these important tools for sustainability.” —Toby Hemenway, author of Gaia’s Garden

Integrated Forest Gardening

Integrated Forest Gardening PDF

Author: Wayne Weiseman

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Published: 2014-08-05

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1603584978

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Permaculture is a movement that is coming into its own, and the concept of creating plant guilds in permaculture is at the forefront of every farmer's and gardener's practice. One of the essential practices of permaculture is to develop perennial agricultural systems that thrive over several decades without expensive and harmful inputs: perennial plant guilds, food forests, agroforestry, and mixed animal and woody species polycultures. The massive degradation of conventional agriculture and the environmental havoc it creates has never been as all pervasive in terms of scale, so it has become a global necessity to further the understanding of a comprehensive design and planning system such as permaculture that works with nature, not against it. The guild concept often used is one of a “functional relationship” between plants–beneficial groupings of plants that share functions in order to bring health and stability to a plant regime and create an abundant yield for our utilization. In other words, it is the integration of species that creates a balanced, healthy, and thriving ecosystem. But it goes beyond integration. A guild is a metaphor for all walks of life, most importantly a group of people working together to craft works of balance, beauty, and utility. This book is the first, and most comprehensive, guide about plant guilds ever written, and covers in detail both what guilds are and how to design and construct them, complete with extensive color photography and design illustrations. Included is information on: • What we can observe about natural plant guilds in the wild and the importance of observation; • Detailed research on the structure of plant guilds, and a portrait of an oak tree (a guild unto itself); • Animal interactions with plant guilds; • Steps to guild design, construction, and dynamics: from assessment to design to implementation; • Fifteen detailed plant guilds, five each from the three authors based on their unique perspectives; • Guild project management: budgets, implementation, management, and maintenance. Readers of any scale will benefit from this book, from permaculture designers and professional growers, to backyard growers new to the concept of permaculture. Books on permaculture cover this topic, but never in enough depth to be replicable in a serious way. Finally, it's here!

The Resilient Farm and Homestead

The Resilient Farm and Homestead PDF

Author: Ben Falk

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1603584447

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The Resilient Farm and Homestead is a manual for developing durable, beautiful, and highly functional human habitat systems fit to handle an age of rapid transition. Ben Falk is a land designer and site developer whose permaculture-research farm has drawn national attention. The site is a terraced paradise on a hillside in Vermont that would otherwise be overlooked by conventional farmers as unworthy farmland. Falk's wide array of fruit trees, rice paddies (relatively unheard of in the Northeast), ducks, nuts, and earth-inspired buildings is a hopeful image for the future of regenerative agriculture and modern homesteading. The book covers nearly every strategy Falk and his team have been testing at the Whole Systems Research Farm over the past decade, as well as experiments from other sites Falk has designed through his off-farm consulting business. The book includes detailed information on earthworks; gravity-fed water systems; species composition; the site-design process; site management; fuelwood hedge production and processing; human health and nutrient-dense production strategies; rapid topsoil formation and remineralization; agroforestry/silvopasture/grazing; ecosystem services, especially regarding flood mitigation; fertility management; human labor and social-systems aspects; tools/equipment/appropriate technology; and much more, complete with gorgeous photography and detailed design drawings. The Resilient Farm and Homestead is more than just a book of tricks and techniques for regenerative site development, but offers actual working results in living within complex farm-ecosystems based on research from the "great thinkers" in permaculture, and presents a viable home-scale model for an intentional food-producing ecosystem in cold climates, and beyond. Inspiring to would-be homesteaders everywhere, but especially for those who find themselves with "unlikely" farming land, Falk is an inspiration in what can be done by imitating natural systems, and making the most of what we have by re-imagining what's possible. A gorgeous case study for the homestead of the future.