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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Barbara Kingsolver ,
Camille Kingsolver , and
Steven L. Hopp
Manufacturer: HarperCollins
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0060852550
Release Date: 2007-05-01 |
Book Description
Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.
"As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain.
"Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel. . . ."
Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.
"This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air."
Book Description
If you love the joys of eating home-garden vegetables but always thought those joys had to stop at the end of summer, this book is for you. Eliot Coleman introduces the surprising fact that most of the United States has more winter sunshine than the south of France. He shows how North American gardeners can successfully use that sun to raise a wide variety of traditional winter vegetables in backyard cold frames and plastic covered tunnel greenhouses without supplementary heat. Coleman expands upon his own experiences with new ideas learned on a winter-vegetable pilgrimage across the ocean to the acknowledged kingdom of vegetable cuisine, the southern part of France, which lies on the 44th parallel, the same latitude as his farm in Maine.
This story of sunshine, weather patterns, old limitations and expectations, and new realities is delightfully innovative in the best gardening tradition. Four-Season Harvest will have you feasting on fresh produce from your garden all through the winter.
Customer Reviews:
Does this book even need another 5-star review?.......2007-10-06
Even if you don't want to garden year round (if you do this is the only book you need), it's a fascinating and fact-filled read. He tells how to garden more efficiently, how to compost and rejuvenate soil with crop rotation and "green manure" and which direction to plant rows for optimal time in the sun. There are formulas throughout such as how high a retaining wall to build to protect plants from cold (the wall heats up during the day and radiates warmth back during the night), or how many degrees to slant a bed to maximize sun and minimize cold wind damage. He tells how to plan succession planting to have vegetables year round, rather than one humungous crop all at once. His tone is congenial, never talking down or above his target audience. It's fascinating--if you buy you won't be sorry!
ORGANIC HOME GARDENER.......2007-08-04
This book is loaded with dynamite information. I have enjoyed reading it and will certainly make use of the info therein in the future!
Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long.......2007-07-15
Eliot Coleman has combined how-to text with drawings that inform and inspire. Highly recommended reading!
Helpful info.......2007-06-28
I am very excited about becoming self-sufficient in feeding my family of six. This book has extremely helpful ideas that are very cost effective. Highly recommend this book.
The bible of 4-season gardening.......2007-04-18
There is nothing like the satisfaction of talking to another seasoned gardener and having them say "isn't it too early for snap-peas?" and responding "nope, mine are doing great". This book gave me the confidence and knowledge to plant a month and a half earlier than I have ever planted before, without protection for the plants even!
It lays out in simple terms variety selection, location, timing and all the information you need to be harvesting vegetables literally all year round all the way down to zone 3!!
Book Description
How to keep any garden looking its best, through the seasons and through the years.
Gardening is the primary recreational activity of Americans. Since the 1980s, when gardening caught fire as a national passion, we have spent billions of dollars on what we grow for our own pleasure; and in all that time, not one book has been published on the broad subject of garden maintenance.
For twenty-five years, the Haywards, expert horticultural consultants and authors of many books and articles, have been tending their own garden in Vermont. Here, beautiful photographs illustrate how and what the Haywards do in their garden from earliest spring until snowfall: pruning trees and shrubs; planting, staking, and dividing perennials; and edging, deadheading, and weeding. They also include many tips for reducing maintenance. Their advice can be put to work in the reader's garden, regardless of size or location. Line drawings by Elayne Sears give more details on specific techniques. Anecdotal, encouraging, and crammed with information, this is a gorgeous treatment of a very practical subject. 237 photographs, 16 drawings.
Book Description
Co-authored by Jacqueline Heriteau, Andre Viette and Mark Viette, all leading gardening experts in the Mid-Atlantic Region (Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Washington D.C.), this proven monthly format has helped gardeners experience more success and enjoyment from their gardens.
Includes the major gardening categories, from annuals and perennials to trees and shrubs, including lawns and vegetables.
The trend in gardening books is toward regional titles, and book retailers are well aware of this.
The Month-by-Month series provides credible information on maintaining plants throughout the year in a specific region. These books contain monthly advice on what to do in the garden and when to do it, and contain several plant categories ranging from annuals to vines.
Gardening is now the favorite leisure pastime in America. Homeowners are realizing the health benefits derived from gardening, and the resulting increase in their home's property value.
Customer Reviews:
Needs to be organized by month, not by plant type.......2007-08-24
I really like the information in this book. However instead of being organized by Month as the title suggests, It is organized by Plant type (perennial, annual,etc.) I find it time consuming and frustrating to have to continually flip from one section to another just to find out what to do for a specific month.
very helpful!.......2006-05-07
This book is the perfect tool for me, as I'm always wondering what I should be doing when to get the best results. It's unique in the way it's written and I don't believe it's meant to be your only resource for gardening information. It's very good at what it does and I actually like the way it's broken down, it works well for me.
Needs to be reorganized.......2006-04-11
I like the idea behind this book a lot. It has a lot of good tips, but it needs to be reorganized. There are January - December sections for annuals, perennials, bulbs, etc. I don't like having to have to go to several different sections for each month. It would be a nicer book if it was better organized.
Very helpful to Mid-Atlantic "newbie".......2005-09-25
I just moved to Maryland from a quite different climate and was unsure how to deal with the changing seasons in this part of the country. It's very helpful to be able to look under a particular month and plant type and figure out what I'm supposed to be doing this time of year. Should I still be pruning my flowers? Is it okay to plant ANYTHING this time of year? What about preparing my garden for the winter? How do I deal with humid summers? My new home has a long-untended yard and garden, so I will pretty much be starting from scratch, and it's great to have some idea what can be planted, when it can be planted, and how to care for it.
Poorly-indexed and frustrating to use.......2005-04-29
At first glance, the book seems to be nicely organized, with month-by-month information for various types of plants/tasks. However, finding information about a particular plant can be frustrating, as the index is inadequate, and not detailed enough. For example, the index for azaleas contains a list of 27 different page numbers, which are not sub-indexed. This group of 27 pages actually covers a large section of azaleas as houseplants, and azaleas as shrubs. It would have been easier to find the information I was looking for if the index had listed "azaleas: houseplants" and then "azaleas: shrubs". Other plants suffer similar indexing fates.
Another gripe is the lack of any easily found index information for pests or for weeds. I recently moved from the West coast, and have found that most of the pests and weeds are completely different. In fact, I have no idea what a "chinch bug" looks like, and this book leaves me in complete ignorance. The book mentions a chinch bug several times, but nowhere is there a picture, nor can I find chinch bug in the index.
Likewise, I cannot find a picture of, for example, nutgrass. Nutgrass is mentioned a few times, but alas, this book fails to help me learn how to identify it.
Overall, I am truly sorry that I spent money on this book.
Book Description
Most gardeners want their borders to be interesting and colorful over a long season, even year-round if winters are not too severe. With this book, Christopher Lloyd shows how he chooses and orchestrates plants so that the borders always look their best. Once having covered the principles of succession planting, Lloyd explores the ingredients necessary to ensure continuously lively borders — from anchor plants and permanent perennials to drop-in plants and self-sowers. Packed with fresh ideas and practical advice for every season, Succession Planting contains all the information you need to create brilliantly successful year-round planting schemes.
Customer Reviews:
Unattainable Beauty!.......2005-11-28
Succession Planting for Year-round Pleasure is a fantastic book by Christopher Lloyd, who has previously written quite a few, which are also excellent. The photos are among the most beautiful I have ever seen, and I give this book my highest honors. But perhaps it deserves some demerit on the grounds of impracticality or even depressing unattainability.
For one thing, Lloyd's long border at his estate at Great Dixter is 200 feet by 15 feet, so many of the effects which he finds practical are not possible in any garden likely to be owned by the bourgeoisie. Further, he gardens in England in perhaps the equivalent to Zone 8. Despite this, he is always looking to push the limits of hardiness with exotic plants. And outside of Britain and coastal Oregon and Washington, there is virtually nowhere in the English-speaking world where the winters are so mild, and yet the summers are not too hot for many of his plants.
So taken altogether, in any combination of 3 plants you might consider, it's a safe bet that 1 of them either can't be grown in your location, or will require extraordinary levels of coddling to get through the winter. At some level there's nothing wrong with that; who hasn't at least considered growing Dahlias or Gladioli, which must be dug up, but can then be stored in most basements? However, his planting schemes are more labor intensive than this. The semi-hardy and tropical plants he loves must be dug up, or have cuttings taken, and many are wintered under glass; to do this for all of his many varied plants, he apparently has at least 3 different temperatures in his greenhouses or cold frames.
Normal (i.e., not superhuman) gardeners use biennials and short-lived perennials (the ones which seed themselves to death) such as Lupines, many Dianthus, Digitalis (foxglove) and Lychnis coronaria, as relatively easy self-sowers, performing enough dead-heading to keep seedlings to a modest level, and hopefully to keep the mother plant alive as well. For Lloyd and his head gardener, Fergus Garrett, the chosen method for all of these but the Lychnis (rose campion) is generally to sow seeds in summer, pot them up and put in a cold frame in October, bed out the next April or May, then rip out the plants as soon as their blooms have faded. Naturally his Lupines make mine look diseased. Damn him to hell and all that. For fuzzy-leaved Verbascums, which he winters in their final positions, he actually suspends a plate of glass over their crowns to keep them dry so they don't rot!
All that said, his plant combinations are exquisite, and many of them are obtainable by most gardeners in temperate climates. More important, the principles he espouses, the color combinations, and the methods of succession among broad types of plants, are all transferable to less intensive methods, or to other plants which are more practical for your situation. Further, I defy anyone to read this book without discovering several new plants he will plan to try out. I am made newly aware especially of several with true- and deep-blue flowers. Buy or borrow this book, but also consider his older books, "The Adventurous Gardener" and "The Well-Tempered Garden." They have essentially no illustrations, but a wealth of cultural information and design ideas and critiques of many plants and cultivars.
I love this book!.......2005-04-06
Normally I don't get into gardening books...I'm a sucker for the pictures, but find the text boring.
This book however has been so fun to read -- and, yes the pictures are beautiful. It helps create a garden for each season, and it shows photos from the same garden each season. I've just planted based on some ideas in this book, so I guess I'll need to report back how it works out.
Book Description
Written by Judy Lowe, a leading gardening expert in the states of Tennessee and Kentucky, the proven monthly format has helped gardeners experience more success and enjoyment from their gardens.
Includes the major gardening categories, from annuals and perennials to trees and shrubs, including lawns and vegetables.
The trend in gardening books is toward regional titles, and book retailers are well aware of this. The
Month-by-Month series provides credible information on maintaining plants throughout the year in a specific region. These books contain monthly advice on what to do in the garden and when to do it, and contain several plant categories ranging from annuals to vines.
Gardening is now the favorite leisure pastime in America. Homeowners are realizing the health benefits derived from gardening, and the resulting increase in their home's property value.
Customer Reviews:
Useful information, useless organization!.......2006-03-18
Honestly, I'd love to give this book more than 2 stars, because it so clearly covers material needed by gardeners in our area (especially beginning to intermediate gardeners like me). Having lived on the West Coast, where the Sunset Western Garden Book is the definitive gardener's bible, I looked high and low for an analog here in the South.
This is not it.
Don't get me wrong: this book has some good information and what's there is written in a highly readable, friendly voice.
But it is not a reference book, and it will not answer every gardening question you may have. And it may even leave you with some new questions after you try to make sense of some of the overly simple descriptions. And maybe that's OK, because it's not billed as that kind of a reference guide.
What is IS billed as, though, is a month-by-month guide to working in the garden. And it's here that it actually fails the most.
Organized into sections by different types of plants (bulbs, shrubs, trees, etc), this book is then further organized within each of those sections by month... ALPHABETICALLY! If that's not the craziest thing you've ever heard, just try to imagine actually using this book to try to understand what you need to do this weekend. You would need to flip through each section for each type of plant in your garden, and then flip around the counterintuitive listing (since when does April come before February, which comes before January?) to find the appropriate month. Lather, rinse, and repeat for each type of plant in your garden.
Why the author and publisher of this book didn't realize it would have made immeasurably more sense to group all the information together for each month and sort those months in CALENDAR order, I have no idea. But I'm here to tell you, it ain't worth it. Stick with the
Southern Living Garden Book and you'll be a lot less frustrated.
Very helpful.......2006-02-18
Excellent advice for all times of the year, even in the winter months, when you might be wondering how to make yourself useful. There are chapters in all the areas involved: trees, shrubs, lawns, bulbs, etc. And of course it is specific to our area.
Month by Month Winner Book.......2005-09-25
This book lives up to its title. I have been gardening for years and learned quite a few new tricks. The book has editions for all parts of the country so buy the right book.
TennesseeGardener.....
Very helpful guide.......2004-05-05
I am enjoying using this book. Since I previously lived in another state with a different climate, I'm not always sure of the right time to do things in the yard -- plant tomoatoes, prune roses, pinch back perennials. This book puts that information at my fingertips. I also like the extensive general information about each type of plant -- from shrubs,trees and vegetables to bulbs and houseplants -- and what really matters with their care. I've learned a lot reading this guide and like the same author's Tennessee Gardener's Guide, too.
month my month gardening.......2004-04-14
Book seems confusing and busy because it is broken down into too many sections. The book has 11 plant categories broken down into 12 monthly sections which total 132 sections. I would prefer to just identify the month and find all the plant categories covered in that month's section. The book requires too much flipping back and forth. It would also be great to have a section on disease detection and control for each month of the year.
Book Description
Includes the major gardening categories, from annuals and perennials to trees and shrubs, including lawns and vegetables.
The
Month-by-Month series provides credible information on maintaining plants throughout the year in a specific state. These books contain monthly advice on what to do in the garden and when to do it, along with the author's personal recommendations on specific plants that perform well in the state.
Gardening is now the favorite leisure pastime in America. More homeowners are enjoying the beauty and satisfaction they derive from improving their home landscape.
Customer Reviews:
Cheater's guide! Help yourself and your plants........2005-09-03
I guess I didn't expect to really like this book, and I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps I have bad associations with month-by-month instructionals. At anyrate, I was completely won over. This book is handy, handy, handy. If you live in NY or a similar climate with the extreme winter and tropical summer, this is a helpful reminder. I garden professionally and still rely on it as a task list just to remind myself when my brain's on overload. Plant categories are covered separately month-by-month which was a little confusing at first glance--why not have all plants listed in monthly sections, but no matter. The categories are: Annuals and Biennials; Bulbs, Corms, Rhizomes, and Tubers; Herbs and Vegetables; Houseplants; Lawns; Perennials; Roses; Shrubs; Trees; Vines, Ground Covers, and Ornamental Grasses; and Water and Bog Plants. Pretty comprehensive. Buy it and make your gardening a little easier!
Helpful reference book I'll use time and time again.......2005-08-08
Clear, concise format -- a little redundant in spots (did we really need to be reminded in every section that January is the month to get our 'wish list' together?) but I expect this expenditure to pay for itself several times over. Thanks!
Book Description
Month-by-Month™ guides offer valuable advice on the proper timing of gardening maintenance for each month. Month-by-Month™ Gardening in the Carolinas is one of the first titles of the redesigned series from Cool Springs Press.
Top features include:
- 4-color photography and illustrations to demonstrate cultural practices
- Covers all major plant categories
- Specific advice for every month of the year
- Updated edition includes text revisions, additional reference materials, and a new design
Customer Reviews:
My 2nd most important gardening book.......2006-03-06
I love this book. I have never read it all the way through, but rather I look up things that I am interested in.
The seed company (and variety) recommendations are likely out of date.
I really appreciate Peirce's reports about her experiences with different plants.
A Wonderful Book --Particularly for those in the SF Bay Area.......2001-09-28
This is a good book both for the avid gardener as well as the beginner. I've given this book as gifts to many people throughout the SF Bay area and everyone has loved this book!It is particularly a good gift if they grow vegetables and have had limited success in some aspects of gardening such as trying to grow tomotoes the coastal areas of the Bay Area. This book has growing charts of when to plant and harvest, best varieties for the bay area, and covers points to explain the many microclimates even within the same city.
A great book with lots of pointers. Note that this is not a book to compete with Sunset's Western Garden Book but rather to supplement it. This book doesn't have the details with regard to horticultural specifics.
The idiots' OR experts' guide to Bay Area gardening........1997-09-28
So this past spring I decided, once and for all, that I wanted to start a garden. I had no experience in this subject, and I searched for a good book at the library. I found this book. I ended up renewing it five times, and finally ordering it from Amazon.com. It has truly been a life saver. What I like best is the way the book is laid out, with sections on vegetables, fruits, and flowers, as well as special sections on pests and other problems. The book is well organized and the index points the reader in the right directions, making it easy to find what I'm looking for down to the tiniest detail. The charts make it clear which San Francisco Bay Area microclimates are suitable for which plants, and the book explains down to the tiniest detail how to start plants, transplant them, grow them, and harvest them. At the same time that this book is informative beyond all my original expections, is also excels in not being condescending (one of my pet peeves). I believe it is the perfect book for the seasoned gardener just moving into the area, the seasoned gardener in need of more detailed information, and someone like me, with no gardening experience whatsoever.
helpful regional grow guide for S.F. area food gardeners.......1997-06-16
Don't let the cumbersome title scare you away from this handy book for Bay Area and coastal California gardeners. Pam Pierce understands the unique Mediterranean microclimate(s) of our great gardening region, and offers sound advice on what to grow, when and how to grow it best. Very helpful and well-organized.
Havi Hoffman
Vegetable Gardens
Growing food in Berkeley, CA
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- Burpee : The Complete Vegetable & Herb Gardener : A Guide to Growing Your Garden Organically
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