Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Sure, this book's been around ages, but it's always worth another read. I've recently picked it up again, and absolutely love the way Kingsolver approaches the local food movement.

In this story, Barbara Kingsolver, her husband, and two daughters leave their desert town to go live on a farm in Virginia to spend an entire year eating locally. They allow themselves a few exceptions (like certain spices), but otherwise, everything is grown within a short drive from their home.

In one of my favorite little anecdotes, Lily, the youngest daughter at six years old, loses one of her beloved chickens. Her mother attempts to console the wailing child, but with no success. In a last ditch effort she tells Lily, "It's only a chicken." Lily responds yelling, "You don't get it! I love chickens more than you!"

A few minutes later, little Lily comes back with a sheepish look on her face. "Mommy," she says. "I didn't mean that. If I love chickens six, then I love you seven."

This story is a wonderful way to become inspired to grow even a little bit of produce, or visit the local farmer's market. She gives us incentive as a culture to ditch the fast-food industrial culture, while also presenting ecological and environmental perspectives on the problems associated with big-business agriculture.

My favorite christmas present

This Christmas was full of wonderful surprises. One of my favorites? This beautifully illustrated children's alphabet book about gardening. The illustrations are amazing, and my mother even got the author to write a personal message to Taylor and I on the inside cover.

Every page is absolutely gorgeous, and the writing is quirky and cute. I'd highly recommend it for anyone of any age.

Gardening with children

We think it's important for young kids to get outside, play in the dirt, and breathe some fresh air. It's been proven to help with all sorts of things, including obesity and attention disorders (for anyone really interested in the subject, check out the book Last Child in the Woods).

We're very happy that Seleighna, our three-year-old next door neighbor loves coming and hanging out in the garden. Every morning she comes to check on her princess, take care of the rabbits, and play in the garden. At the library I've picked up a couple of books with gardening activities for children. I think we're going to put together a little two foot by two foot bed for her to plant some flowers and vegetables in, and maybe work with some of the other activities. They're really cute books, and seem to have activities even adults may enjoy.

Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

I'll admit it. I am a sucker for Michael Pollan. I started by reading The Botany of Desire, and quickly read through The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. This past weekend I just finished reading Second Nature: A Gardener's Education.

It was a very entertaining and diverse read, and quite beautifully written. He focused a lot on flowers, which isn't a huge interest of mine, but he did include lots of information that pertained to both. One thing I particularly liked was how broadly he used the word garden. In one chapter, called The Idea of a Garden, he talked about a pine forest near his home that suffered from a devastating tornado. Local citizens wanted to just leave it be, and let it regrow however it happened to. Pollan went and talked to local professors and ecologists about primary succession (the way that ecosystems regrow after a disturbance), and they stated that the forest would most likely be overtaken by invasive species. He left us with this quote, "Often, in this day and age, a landscape that bears no mark of human intervention will require some amount of human intervention."

So many books needing a home

Last week, Taylor and I noticed that there were stacks of books everywhere. We've checked out over 30 books on gardening from the library, and had a decent collection ourselves to start with. Things were just way too crowded, and we decided we needed a better method.

Incidentally, we also had a pile of scrap wood left over from the picket fence we built for our chicken run. Because it was pressure treated, we couldn't really use it to build vegetable beds or a beehive.

Suddenly, we had a moment of insight, which resulted in something really awesome.



It was a fun little project, and it only took an hour. I love looking at our wide variety of interests represented on the shelf. There are books on business, gardening, cars, knitting, art, architecture, beekeeping, and herbs among other things.

Current reading

I"m currently reading How To Grow More Vegetables by John Jeavons. This book's been around for a couple of decades, and has been published in several different languages, too.

It focuses on the Grow Biointensive method, which is kind of like super-organized wide-row planting. It promotes organic farming too, which is awesome. With sections on composting, starting seeds, and maintaining a balanced ecosystem in the backyard, it's a drastic change from the other gardening guides I have that display charts for fertilizer mixes, and suggested pesticides for various crops (some are actually published by various fertilizer and pesticide companies, like the Ortho book I found on the bookshelf here).


I love the cover of the book too. It inspired those watercolors I posted a few days back.

The book also seems like it can grow along with the gardener, with some great basic information for the beginner, and more complicated charts and graphs for those experienced gardeners trying to calculate yields and analyze soil composition.

I really love this book, and it's going to be a couple of years before I can really use all of the information inside. I got it at Borders ($19.00, but I used a coupon and got it for less), but there's a bunch of copies on Amazon for less than that.