Customer Reviews

How to Grow More Vegetables: And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book was loaned to me by a friend who has used it's techniques to produce high-yield growth in his gardens. I have always wanted to have a self sufficent garden, and land for this, but have always thought I would need a number of acres to do this. I am now planning on purchasing a home with one acre and am confident that with the techniques detailed in this book, I will be able to produce good crops for home-grown organic vegetables.

There is so much information here on composting, conpanion planting, how plants and thier root systems grow and interact, how to make the garden beds, why beds and clumps are better and yield more produce than planting in rows, soil composition, garden implements and more.

There are diagrams for everything you need to know presented in such a way that it's easy to understand and implement. There is so much information here, it would be usefull to a complete beginer like me or an experienced gardner.

Happy Planting!

First of all, I was a bit mislead by the title, as I thought this book covered vegetables, fruits, and etc. by individual plants, but it doesn't. There is a chapter with charts that includes companion planting, when to plant, when to harvest, etc. but there was not much detailed info. I would have liked more of that.
One objection I had was that there was too much of the author's philosophy included, as another previous reviewer stated. This wasn't of any particular use to me, and I thought the space taken by it would have been better used with more gardening information.
Be that as it may, a few of the chapters were very useful, such as the chapter I mentioned with the numerous charts. I was going to try and design my own, but now I'll simply use these which saves me an enormous amount of time. Other charts included companion plantings of vegetables and herbs, quite useful as well.
It should also be clarified that this book zones in on BIOINTENSIVE planting, meaning that all of the info is geared to gardening in raised beds. I did not know this at the time of my purchase, and it would have been a deciding factor, as I'm not using raised beds.
However, much of the information included can be adapted for application in normal beds, but not all of it. If you are planning on gardening in raised beds, this is the one and only for you, but if your planting the standard garden like I am, you might want to look at another book.

This book is an amazing, overwhelming wealth of information.
I'm not sure I totally agree with all the advice - he's somewhat
anti-manure and recommends transplanting everything twice. It
mentions things like phase of the moon planting, but it's not
dogmatic about these more offbeat ideas. The real value is
the charts for the growing needs, spacing, etc. for every plant
and grain and tree, with suggested layouts and rotations; and
how it targets sustainably suppling real food for people, in
quantities needed to live on, rather than just growing the odd
vegetable for fun.
They are, I believe, in Northern CA so more appropriate for me
in Oregon than many of the Rodale and other east-coast authors.

THis book I would suggest to anyone that wants to learn how to produce a productive vegetable garden. I used to plant in rows with mixed results, but once I started composting and using the rasied bed meathod along with planting in blocks instead of rows, well I have enough to can and make my own home-made condiments now. I HIGHLY reccomend this book!!

First, 1/3 of this book is bibliography, ie. stuff I most probably have no use for. Secondly its a very dated book, lots of line drawings (not very good ones at that) that looks old, and no photos. Also its a very hard book to read, there's like 2 chapters devoted to convincing you of their philosophy (plus loads of new age crap), and every chapter is like that. The style and language used does not make it easy to understand what it is the author is trying to say. Sometimes I have to read and re-read a paragraph a few times to understand. For a guy that reads technical specifications everyday for a living, this is BAD writing.

On the plus side, there's a lot of technical information if you can filter out all the propoganda and understand what the author is saying. I really find this book hard to read, but the title really tells me the author was very good at marketing.

If you need technical info, and have the patience to filter out the other stuff, and don't mind paying for lots of pages thats useless to you, get it.

this book contains a lot of technical information such as
"the avarage number of pounds of a crop eaten by each american in a year," and "the ph soil balance of crops" it is not for casual practicionars, i would recomend it only to serious farmers, but to them, it would be eccelent.