One Magic Square Vegetable Gardening
The Easy, Organic Way to Grow Your Own Food on a 3-Foot Square
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This 2nd edition of the classic gardening guide features more than 40 small garden designs for everything from stir-fry vegetables to anti-cancer foods.
For decades, Lolo Houbein has cultivated her own organic fruits, vegetables and herbs from small gardens of no more than 3 feet square. Now she shows readers how to reap an abundant harvest from a tiny plot of land. One Magic Square features plot designs geared toward specific themes, like soups, salads, and starchy staples, as well as plots of edible flowers, and antioxidant-rich foods—with encyclopedic information about every crop in every plot.
With wisdom and humor, Lolo shares sustainable, cost-effective techniques for using compost, saving water, troubleshooting weeds and pests and more. She also offers tips on drying, freezing, pickling, and other ways to get more value and enjoyment from your homegrown produce.
Ever encouraging, often charming, and always practical, this expanded second edition of One Magic Square Vegetable Gardening will help first-time gardeners get started—and help veteran gardeners get results—on a small, easy-to-maintain plot.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Australian gardener Houbein has a personal and intimate understanding of food security, having survived famine during the Nazi occupation in Holland. In this charming but meandering book, she warns of the dangers of globalized, corporate agribusiness and aims to put you in control of the production of at least part of the food you need. She claims that one square yard of garden will provide a 10th of a person's food needs and encourages everyone to start a magic square or two. The book provides basic gardening information and a wide variety of square-yard vegetable garden plans, from salad plots to curry and anticancer plots, with sections on fruit trees and chickens thrown in, but this is as much a compilation of Houbein's gardening life as a straightforward step-by-step how-to manual. Like an eccentric but wise great aunt, at turns whimsically practical ( apart from spreading shredded bracken on beds to decay, use ferns as parasols for seedlings ) and confusingly questionable ( At this point in time, vast stretches of land are being poisoned by carbon dioxide smoke from brush and forest fires ), Houbein offers much valuable advice, but the presentation is so disorganized that novice gardeners looking for a clear and simple way to get started may be flummoxed.
