This post may contain affiliate links.
We are pleased to announce that the Homesteaders’ Book Club is going to dig deeper this spring and read a gardening book that will offer new insight to almost any homesteader!
Are you itching to start your spring gardening tasks, or maybe already getting started? Are you a newbie gardener wanting to learn some solid ways to make your backyard garden produce? Maybe you want to expand your garden and do so as efficiently as possible, or even get into marketing some of your produce?
No matter where you’re at when it comes to gardening, we think you’ll be excited to dig into a gardening-related read with the Homesteaders’ Book Club this Spring (2019)! You’ll not only get some great advice from an expert author, you’ll get to discuss that advice and compare reactions and ideas with homesteaders from around the world through our virtual book club!
This Spring’s Book Group read is being sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing and we’re choosing between two awesome gardening books that offer in-depth information on old and new methods for small-scale farming or backyard gardening.
Help us choose a book by joining the Homesteaders’ Book Group on Facebook and voting for the book you’d like to read!
By voting, you’ll be entered to win a FREE COPY of the selected book!
Our choices include (drum roll please)….
Option 1: Gaia’s Garden
A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd Edition (Hemenway, 2009)
Gaia’s Garden is one of Chelsea Green’s most popular gardening books, and focuses on the idea of working with nature, not against her, by creating small-scale ecosystem in your gardening. Think permaculture is just for big farms? Think again. This book demonstrates how you can use ecological gardening techniques to create a “backyard ecosystem” even on a small urban homestead (or anywhere in between).
In this book, you’ll learn how to assemble “communities of plants that can work cooperatively and perform a variety of functions” and therefore make your garden more productive and LESS backbreaking (who can argue with that!?).
Option 2: The New Organic Grower
A Master’s Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener, 30th Anniversary Edition (Coleman, 2018)
In it’s 3rd updated edition, this classic book by Eliot Coleman is described as “one of the most important farming books available” by a pioneer in the organic farming movement. Don’t consider yourself a large “farmer?” Don’t worry, this book promises that even farms or gardens under 2 acres can be profitable and successful when approached strategically.
Again, this book focuses on gardening methods that work in harmony with mother nature, and this updated edition includes numerous examples of new tools and techniques that Coleman has learned along the way.
If you want gardening to be a big part of your homestead and want to learn successful organic gardening techniques from one of the “elders” of the movement, this book might be the one for you.
Click here to join the Homesteaders Book Club and vote for the book you’d like to read!
Vote by March 9, 2019. We’ll announce the winning book (and giveaway winner) on March 10, then you’ll have two weeks to get your hands on a copy of the book and we’ll start reading on March 30th.
Huge thanks to Chelsea Green Publishing for their partnership and sponsorship! If you haven’t checked out their amazing collection of books on sustainable living, we encourage you to do so!
Carrie Williams Howe is an educational leader by day and an aspiring homesteader by night and weekend. She lives on a small homestead in Vermont with her husband, two children, and a rambunctious border collie. She blogs about her family's homestead life at The Happy Hive.
