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Small-Plot, High-Yield Gardening: How to Grow Like a Pro, Save Money, and Eat Well by Turning Your Back (or Front or Side) Yard Into An Organic Produce Garden - Softcover

Gilbertie, Sal; Sheehan, Larry

 
9781580080378: Small-Plot, High-Yield Gardening: How to Grow Like a Pro, Save Money, and Eat Well by Turning Your Back (or Front or Side) Yard Into An Organic Produce Garden
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1580080375 ISBN 13: 9781580080378
Verlag: Ten Speed Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Are you tired of throwing away time, energy, and money on a perfectly manicured, water-guzzling, weed-producing lawn? Are you longing to feed your family in more healthful and eco-friendly ways but shocked by organic produce prices at the grocery store? Do you fantasize about growing your own food but hesitate to take on more than you can manage?
 
If you answered yes to any of these questions, it’s time for you to get down and dirty—and take the plunge that will please your taste buds and your pocket-book! In Small-Plot, High-Yield Gardening, Sal Gilbertie and Larry Sheehan will help you turn your sprawling suburban acreage or postage stamp–sized plot into a low-impact, all-organic, totally sustainable produce garden.
 
You’ll learn about the most effective natural fertilizers, drought-resistant cultivation methods, pest-repellent companion plantings, trends in heirloom herb and vegetable varieties, and raised-bed techniques for achieving maximum productivity in a limited space. You can even add a cutting garden so you’ll always have fresh flowers on a kitchen table that’s groaning under the weight of incomparably fresh vegetables seasoned with a variety of home-grown herbs.
 
Whether you’re filling a 10’ x 10’ sandbox or digging up your 3,000-square-foot tennis court, any yard has the potential to produce a multi-crop bonanza. And anyone with a little soil and a lot of heart can do it!

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sal Gilbertie is the third-generation proprietor of Gilbertie’s Herb Gardens in Westport, Connecticut. Established in 1922 by Sal’s grandfather, Gilbertie’s is the largest herb grower in the United States today, shipping hundreds of varieties to more than 800 garden centers, plant nurseries, and farms.
 
Coauthor Larry Sheehan has a long list of writing credits that includes newspapers, magazines, television documentaries, and dozens of books including the best-selling Living with Dogs and The Sporting Life.

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I. Gardening at a Glance
 
You Don’t Have to Be Italian to Grow Good Peppers
 
I have a customer who is the consummate “gardener from the old country.” If he eats a delicious peach, he saves the pit and plants it somewhere in the yard. He has a one-third-acre lot in the middle of town, but if he eats a dozen good peaches in the season, he’ll plant a dozen peach trees.
 
Some of the peach pits do germinate, and one or two occasionally survive the ravages of the neighborhood kids and dogs, and my friend eventually gets peaches off them. But when one of the trees dies in the spring, does he cut it down? No. He plants pole beans at the base of the trunk. By summer the branches of the tree are covered with thousands of dangling beans. So he gets another crop out of the tree, dead or alive.
 
It is in this man’s make-up to grow things, not because he is Italian, but because he grew up in a family who happened to have a garden.
 
I’ve noticed that many of our visitors to Nana’s Garden, which is on the grounds of our garden center as a kind of demonstration plot, have an inferiority complex about gardening because they’re not of Italian or Yankee heritage. In my part of the country, East-Coast Yankees and older Italians are believed to have the proverbial green thumb.
 
I tell our visitors that good gardening is not in the genes. It’s in the jeans—the pants you wear when you have to work hard at something. It’s the product of knowledge and experience, and if you didn’t grow up with a gardening background, you’re going to have to acquire the knowledge and experience on your own, with the help of friendly neighbors, neighborly friends, and books like this one.
 
Offhand, I can think of a veritable melting pot of outstanding gardeners among our customers—a Swede who specializes in early peas, a Scot with a knack for lettuces, an African-American who grows an amazing variety of medicinal herbs, a Greek who raises giant Spanish onions. . . .
 
Obviously, vegetable gardening is not, cannot be, and should not be a contest among races, religions, and creeds. No one is born with a green thumb. Anyone can learn to garden successfully.
 
All that aside, in case you ever want to win an argument about who may be the best gardeners in the world, I suggest you consider the implications of a list compiled by the United Nations ranking countries according to agricultural output per acre. It reveals that many of the nations small in geographical size are in fact the most productive in their farming techniques.
 
The Top 10:
 
Republic of China (Taiwan)
United Arab Republic (Egypt)
The Netherlands
Belgium
Japan
Denmark
Germany
South Korea
Sri Lanka
Norway
 
I’d just like to know what happened to the Italians.
 
 
Why Bother?
 
The ostensible reasons so many of my customers are turning to vegetable gardening are to save money and to eat better.
 
Why are vegetables so expensive?
 
There are fewer farmers growing them, mainly. Not long ago, New Jersey—known as the “Garden State”—announced it had lost tens of thousands of its traditional truck-farming acreage to soybean-farming enterprises. A single big-cash crop like soybeans happens to be a lot easier for a farmer to manage than a mess of vegetable fields. With world population expected to exceed 7 billion any minute now and to reach 9 billion by the year 2040, there is going to be a lot more pressure on farmers who are in the business of growing varied crops to either sell their land or convert their fields to the big basic crops.
 
Truck farms are also being lost to real-estate developments all over the country, which is nothing new but it’s continuing to erode the supply of fresh vegetables. As most such farms tend to be located fairly near their outlets in metropolitan areas, they’re naturally regarded as attractive and potentially valuable building sites.
 
There are fewer farmers, period. The rural life that Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers extolled and promoted has practically disappeared. As late as the 1880s and 1890s, some 25 percent of Americans lived on farms. Today less than 1 percent do. We have more people living in prisons than on farms these days.
 
The most recent Census of Agriculture, conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) every five years, shows some hopeful signs, however. The number of farms in America peaked in 1935, at 6.8 million, and declined for several decades after that. In the last two decades, it has leveled off between 2 million and 2.5 million.
 
The number of small farms increased by 4 percent from 2002 to 2007, with most of the new farms being part-time operations. Although often disparaged as “farmettes” or “hobby” farms, they represent a significant amount of farmland saved from disuse or development. Another encouraging sign: there were 18,200 organic farms in 2007, compared with about 12,000 in 2002.
 
Within the farming community, the balance of power continues to shift from small to humongous. Consider the fact that about 900,000 of the nation’s farms generated $2,500 or less in sales per farm in 2007. In contrast, 5 percent of total farms—about 125,000 operations—accounted for 75 percent of agricultural production. Not surprisingly, those operations receive the majority of government farm subsidies. In 2001, for example, a mega-operation called Tyler Farms in Arkansas received $8.1 million in subsidies—90,000 times more than the median farm subsidy of $899—and nearly equal to the total of farm subsidies to all farmers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined.
 
 
Big Oil, Meet Big Soil
 
But there is also good news on the good-food front. The Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, started in 1984, now has more than 3,000 small farms growing food crops for subscriber families who pay a fee in advance to the farmer, then collect fresh organic produce—usually on a weekly basis—throughout the growing season. Many of these CSA farms also offer organic meat products to their members. (Sales of organic poultry and dairy products soared in the 1990s.) Each CSA farm represents acreage saved from development and another farming family saved from extinction.
 
There was a 40 percent increase in farmers’ markets between 2002 and 2006 (totaling 4,385 markets nationwide at the end of 2006). And nothing epitomizes the glories of fresh local fare better than a good farmers’ market. Shoppers at the farmers’ market in Seattle, for example, can take home the Ozette, a fingerling Spanish potato; the Geoduck, a clam-flavored mollusk; the Pluot, a cross between a plum and apricot; and bushels and bushels of that staple of the Pacific Northwest, sour pie cherries.
 
Apart from supplying their customers with glorious produce and a wide range of locally made food products, farmers’ markets often feature free performances by local musicians and the handiwork of local craftspeople and artists. A farmers’ market is a vital gathering place for the community it serves, a place where people make friends with farmers, home chefs and restaurant chefs alike find delectables for their menus, and everyone chews the fat about everything under the sun.
 
Also making gains in recent years are food co-ops, community gardens (despite the loss of federal funding in the 1990s), and a national USDA-funded farm-to-school program, designed to get local produce into local schools as part of...

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Verlag
Ten Speed Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1580080375
ISBN 13 
9781580080378
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Ten Speed Press
https://crownpublishing.com/

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY
New York
NY
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar