Some Holiday Reading for Your Favorite Farmer, Aspiring Farmer, or Avid Gardener

If you’re in the gift-giving mode this holiday season, or just looking for something to read, here’s a list of suggestions for the gardener or farmer in your life, from inspiration to reference book.

Inspiring Reads
My latest favorite comes from France, where many of the intensive, organic gardening technique we’ve learned originated. Miraculous Abundance tells how two French adventures, Perrine and Charles Hervé-Gruyer, built a gorgeous small farm and became leading advocates for micro-agriculture. She was an international lawyer headquartered in Japan, he captained a wooden sailing vessel and led scientific and cultural voyages around the world. When they met they had both decided they needed something else in their lives. They acquired an old farm in Normandy and in the course of transforming it discovered first permaculture, then the classics of market gardening. Less than half an acre of market gardens provides a modest living, but fruit trees, farm animals, small ponds, and a woodland make up a gorgeous and prosperous small farm, and a flurry of visitors and classes keeps the two of them and a small crew busy.

Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest will inspire the year round gardener in you. Part travelogue, part handbook of winter production, Coleman’s book shows that harvesting fresh produce throughout the winter can be done and demonstrates how. Coleman should know. His one and a half acre farm in Maine produces throughout the year. But this is a book for home gardeners as much as for market producers. It’s full of advice on storing crops like chicory that can be livened up in mid-winter to produce fresh greens, plants that produce through the coldest, darkest months and how to use them in the kitchen, and structures simple and complex that can protect plants through the winter.

For the avid gardener eager to produce more than lettuce, kale and tomatoes, Carol Deppe’s The Resilient Gardener provides a road map to producing and using high-calorie crops on a small scale. Carol can get a bit long-winded, but she is always informative. A plant geneticist turned homesteader (and breeder of crops appropriate to homesteads), she has lots to say about what makes a crop worthwihle or not. An aging gardener, she is a wealth of thoughtful insights into the ergonomics of gardening, with suggestions for tools that will not break your back or wear down your joints. Her choice of crops, interestingly, is all-American: corn, beans, squash, potatoes, and eggs (she prefers duck eggs). And each chapter explores varieties, including some she has developed herself, how to grow them, and how to cook them.

All three books are by Chelsea Green Publications and can be quickly acquired by your local independent bookseller, no charge for shipping.

How To’s

Whether you’re starting a farm, thinking about doing so, or just eager for new ideas about how to do what you’re doing better, there are any number of books to guide you. Here are my current favorites.

The classic among these is Eliot Coleman’s The New Organic Grower. Published in 1995 it has been an inspiration to many, because it sets out to show how to put together a small farming operation that is both doable and profitable. Coleman is sensitive to questions of ergonomics, like Carol Deppe, and he is also an avid tinkerer and inventor. Part of the charm of the book is his exploration of what tools work for what tasks and of tools and techniques he has invented to make small-scale, mostly hand worked farming both efficient and physically sustainable for the farmer. Written in the old-fashioned style of the old farming books that Coleman has spent a lifetime mining for advice and information, the book not only lays out his chosen approach to market gardening but alternative ways of doing everything from crop rotation to hoop house construction.

Jean-Martin Fortier’s The Market Gardener was inspired by Coleman’s example and presents some tested ways of setting up a small-scale farm that can sustain a family. Fortier and his wife farm in Quebec. Their farm is just an acre and a half in production, like Coleman’s. They emphasize that farming on this scale takes more than persistence and determination. It takes careful planning and management, and their farm layout is the first example. Starting from scratch, they were able to carefully position fields, hoop houses and propagation, processing and storage sheds to maximize ease of access. They have chosen their tools and techniques to fit their goals and scale of production. The farm itself, Les Jardins de la Grelinette, is named after a favorite hand tool, the broadfork (grelinette). But they have gladly adopted machines like the walking tractor where appropriate.

The Lean Farm puts all its emphasis on the careful planning and design and good management that Jean-Martin Fortier puts at the center of his own farming operation. Ben Hartman adapts the insights into efficient process that were developed at Toyota and made famous as “lean manufacturing” to farming. The key idea is to identify sources of waste in our farming operations and eliminate or minimize them, while monitoring carefully to see what is working and what can be improved. Becoming conscious of what constitutes “waste” is key to the approach. Wasted movement, for example, starts with the search of tools in a disorganized work space and infects even such simple tasks as harvesting. The cures include keeping tools closest to where they will be needed in the garden (and making sure they go back after each task), learning when to bundle in the field, and establishing the shortest distance from field to packing shed to storage. The book is full of tools for analysis of the everyday processes of farming and hints for how to streamline production. Using these tools, Hartman reports that he and his wife managed to scale down from three acres to just an acre and a half, while making a better living and having more time off. This is the best farm “business” book I know, because it eschews the usual accounting and marketing pablum and gets down to how to make a farm work.

These, too, are Chelsea Green publications.

References

It is hard to decide whether John Jeavons’ How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruit Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Ever Imagined belongs in the How To category or here. But I want to emphasize its importance as an indispensable reference for the small-scale home or commercial gardener. The book is indeed a how to manual for the version of biointensive gardening that Jeavons and his organization, Ecology Action, have developed over the last forty years. It includes detailed information on plant spacing for intensive gardening that I go back to over and over again. Chapters on composting include valuable information on carbon-nitrogen ratios, along with lists of sources for successful, plant-based composting. And the companion planting charts are important for anyone planning crop rotations or interplanting. Available from Bountiful Gardens, Ecology Actions’ small seed company, at: https:bountifulgardens.org.

More clearly a reference tool than a “good read,” Suzanne Ashworth’s Seed to Seed includes a thorough botanical catalogue of major plant groups in the vegetable garden, alongside specific growing and seed saving information. The first section is an introduction to seed saving, from pollination patterns to isolation distances and techniques, harvesting to storage. The second section catalogues the major vegetable families, with not quite exhaustive listings of varieties, as well as seed saving information, basic growing instruction, and regional growing recommendations. If you are wondering whether you can grow a Delicata variety in the same field as a Red Kuri Squash and save the seeds from both (you can), this is the place to find out.

I’m a vegetable grower, so these suggestions reflect my reading. Perhaps Ruthie King will find the time this year or next to provide a similar list for the livestock grower. Some great orchard books (like Michael Phillips, The Holistic Orchard) and grain growing handbooks would also contribute to a list to suit all.

And, of course, if you’d like to give the gift of farming education to all those aspiring farmers out there, the Grange School’s year-end fund raising campaign would welcome your donation at: https://trainingfuturefarmers.causevox.com.

Author: Michael Foley