Having seen some excellent recent Blotanical posts about the essential tools, such as this one by karly_winkler, and about planning for your garden, such as this one by kitchen_55, I thought I'd jump on board and add my own five cents (lowest denomination coin in Australia). My contribution is simply a list of those books I personally consider to be a "must read before you start". They're the books I find myself reading and referring to again and again and wish I'd found before spending a small fortune :) They're slanted more towards edible gardens and they're not general introduction to gardening books - there's probably way too many good ones of them to count and they'll be more hemisphere specific.
It's supposed to be a top five, but I hope I'll be forgiven for stretching it just one to six. I've not included links to any particular book seller because: a) I'm Australian so probably use different online sites; and b) so noone thinks this is a massive spam post attracting people to the wiley services of the good Mr/Miss Amazon.com (enter that domain at your own risk.
My top six are:
- Gaia's Garden: A guide to home-scale permaculture (Toby Hemenway)
- Edible Forest Gardens Volume I & II (Dave Jacke & Eric Toensmeier)
- Composting: A down-to-earth, water-wise guide (Penguin Books)
- No-Dig Gardening (Esther Deans)
- Gardening Down-Under: A guide to healthier soils and plants (Kevin Handreck)
- Fabulous Food from every small garden (Mary Horsfall)
Of course, this post is also to attract some pointers towards great books I might have missed or those essential books I'm just about to grow into. So, tell me, what are your top three books?
What else must I add to my library?
Thus far my books have all been along the "basics for beginners" route, but I need to start expanding. The basics did help, because I knew nothing, but now they just don't seem to answer my questions!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the recommendations Flo! We've just been talking about setting up a 'no dig' garden, so I'll look out for that one. The CSIRO book is already on the wish list!
ReplyDeleteSadly I can't offer any recommendations as as always, I've gone about the whole thing backwards :D
Great suggestions! I have done some reading about no dig gardening. Sounds like a good technique. I am remembering my weekend (shovels and pitchforks included) and wondering why I haven't jumped on the no-dig bandwagon yet. hummm...
ReplyDeleteIt's not a "how to" book, but it's the most inspiring garden book I have ever read: check out Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.