Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd Edition by Toby Hemenway

Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd Edition by Toby Hemenway
Print Length: 313 Pages
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Publication Date: April 2009
Language: English
ASIN: B005GLMASS
ISBN-10: 1603580298
ISBN-13: 978-1603580298
File Format: PDF
The first edition of Gaia’s Garden sparked the imagination of America’s home gardeners, introducing permaculture’s central message: Working with Nature, not against her, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens. This extensively revised and expanded second edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban growers.

Many people mistakenly think that ecological gardening—which involves growing a wide range of edible and other useful plants—can take place only on a large, multiacre scale. As Hemenway demonstrates, it’s fun and easy to create a “backyard ecosystem” by assembling communities of plants that can work cooperatively and perform a variety of functions, including:

– Building and maintaining soil fertility and structure
– Catching and conserving water in the landscape
– Providing habitat for beneficial insects, birds, and animals
– Growing an edible “forest” that yields seasonal fruits, nuts, and other foods

This revised and updated edition also features a new chapter on urban permaculture, designed especially for people in cities and suburbs who have very limited growing space. Whatever size yard or garden you have to work with, you can apply basic permaculture principles to make it more diverse, more natural, more productive, and more beautiful. Best of all, once it’s established, an ecological garden will reduce or eliminate most of the backbreaking work that’s needed to maintain the typical lawn and garden.

Shows how to leverage the power of natural ecosystems to make gardening easy!

There is a lot to absorb from this book. After having spent the last two months reading it and applying tips from it, I wish I’d read the last chapter first since it summarizes everything. It takes the mountain of overwhelming knowledge and gives a simple path forward.

Since reading this book, I have a more holistic view of my yard. I can see I’ve already made some mistakes in my yard, but it is exciting to begin to see results already. Instead of following the usual route of planting rows of veggies, I’ve started working on symbiotic blends of nitrogen fixers, vines, and other roles.

Today I picked up a cheap bird feeder and post from a hardware store and put up a quick bird feeder over a dry, weedy patch in the back. I look forward to seeing how well the author’s claim that doing this will lead to passive, ongoing returns in the form of birds’ fertilizing the barren area with their poop and their weeding the area as some scratch around the ground looking for fallen seeds.

His urban ideas are incredible, too. Don’t miss out on that chapter, even though it’s tucked in just before the end. He has a few pages devoted to what you can do with the “hell strip” between the road and sidewalk (usually just used for a mailbox and cable tv lines).

Don’t skip the observation step he gives in an incredible several pages and sidebar. While we did some of this work, I wish we’d done even more extensive up-front observation. It turned out we had to overhaul our plans once the people came out and marked the utility lines. They weren’t where we thought they were originally. But I’m so glad this book showed us how to find out these things early on. It would be a shame to plant an expensive tree and pour water and resources into it only to have it uprooted later on.

If there is one reason to buy this book, it’s because it will shift your perspective away from seeing gardening as a chore with unending maintenance. Instead, by working with nature instead of against it, problems can become signals, temporary obstacles, or just part of the normal flow. The book is pragmatic, realistic, backed with science and research, and a lot of fun. Get it, read it, and try it out.