Price : $15.49

Product Description

Permaculture is a verbal marriage of permanent and agriculture. Australian Bill Mollison pioneered its development. Key features include:

• use of compatible perennials;

• non-invasive planting techniques;

• emphasis on biodiversity;

• specifically adaptable to local climate, landscape, and soil conditions;

• highly productive output of edibles.
  Now, picture your backyard as one incredibly lush garden, filled with edible flowers, bursting with fruit and berries, and carpeted with scented herbs and tangy salad greens. The visual impact is of Monets palette, a wash of color, texture, and hue. But this is no still life. The flowers nurture endangered pollinators. Bright-featured songbirds feed on abundant berries and gather twigs for their nests.
  The plants themselves are grouped in natural communities, where each species plays a role in building soil, deterring pests, storing nutrients, and luring beneficial insects. And finally, you–good ol homo sapiens–are an integral part of the scene. Your garden tools are resting against a nearby tree, and have a slight patina of rust, because this garden requires so little maintenance. You recline into a hammock to admire your work. You have created a garden paradise.
  This is no dream, but rather an ecological garden, which takes the principles of permaculture and applies them on a home-scale. There is nothing technical, intrusive, secretive, or expensive about this form of gardening. All that is required is some botanical knowledge (which is in this book) and a mindset that defines a backyard paradise as something other than a carpet of grass fed by MiracleGro.

   

  Customer Reviews

  Review date : 2008-12-06
  Maybe I’m naive and uninformed, but I found this book eye-opening. I did read it a couple years ago now, but its ideas and principles were fascinating to me. Much of what it recommends, I was already doing, because most of my gardening techniques come from foggy memories of my grandmothers and their gardens. Because both my grandmothers were pretty poor (dirt poor?), they couldn’t afford pesticides or herbicides or irrigation or manicured lawns. So, they built up beautiful gardens with crush planting and recycling of resources and careful siting of particular plants. They knew their space and their plants, and they never wasted anything. I try to do what they did and expand on it through what I can learn from books. This book gave me a lot in terms of principles for what I do and why I do it. What I maybe understood on an intuitive level or didn’t understand at all but just did, this book provided a foundation for and then built further on that foundation. I’m always in search of more books of this type — that address how a home-owner can use some of the principles of permaculture and ideas for minimizing work and human input in the garden through more "natural" methods of gardening. Too few books seem to try to tackle such issues on a small scale for single homes. This book was a great start. So, if you didn’t have grandmothers like mine but you’re interested in learning how to make the most of your garden with the least human input, start with this book.

  Review date : 2008-09-09
  The Library journal review does a huge disservice to this book.

  Imagine a beautiful, highly productive, virtually weed-free,

  drought-resistant, inexpensive, low-maintenance and ecologically sound

  garden bed in your yard. It sounds impossible, but it is very simple

  and only requires a few hours to create this fall, no digging required.

  You can put to use the bounty of leaves and/or pine needles that are

  provided for free to almost every suburbanite in the fall. This

  is the ideal time, as the bed is better if it can break down over the

  winter.

  I have been gardening for about 25 years, and wish had I had heard of

  this method sooner. It is perfect, especially for those who are not

  physically able to dig, till or do a lot of weeding or simply have very

  little time for gardening.

  It involves piling up and wetting down 8 -12 inches of layers of

  organic matter (we used leaves and some manure) on top of a thin layer

  of newspapers or cardboard, with a small amount of amendments such as

  greensand, lime and rock phosphate and manure underneath the paper. On

  the top is a 1-2 inch layer of mulch (we used white pine needles), to

  keep in moisture and suppress weeds. Come spring, you simply push aside

  the top mulch and plant seedlings.

  This ’sheet mulching’ method came from this wonderful book by Toby

  Hemenway. We have several sheet mulch beds this

  year, and they are outrageously productive. For example, one 4′ x 9′

  bed in a very sunny spot, contains 6 large tomato plants, 3 sweet

  pepper plants, 3 cucumber vines on a trellis, a short row of

  sunflowers, one summer squash plant, and 7 winter squash plants. I

  find this amazing considering that the ground underneath is very poor,

  sandy and barely supported grass.

  With apologies to Mae West, I have learned a big lesson, it’s not the soil

  in your life, it’s the life in your soil!

  I bought this book in January and have many times over saved the price in
  time, mulch and bought amendments using ONLY the sheet mulch idea.

  Review date : 2008-09-02
  An excellent book and resource. At the time I purchased this book, I also purchased Bill Mollison’s seminal work on permaculture. I intended to read Mollison’s book first and Gaia’s Garden second. After reading the first few pages of Mollison’s book, I set it aside to "look through" Gaia’s Garden just to familiarize myself with its contents. I discovered that I could not put it down because it is so well written and informative. I recommend this book to all persons interested in the subject of permaculture.

  Review date : 2007-12-26
  This was recommended by someone when I started asking questions about permaculture. I am glad he did! It is a great introduction without being too simplistic. It is showing me how to start small and gradually increase the use of permaculture.

  I have shown it to friends who are all waiting to borrow it from me!

  Review date : 2007-11-09
  This book is excellent for establishing new concepts of applying time tested old technology. I use these principles everyday and I look forward to the days when we need to rely on our local resources and skills in order to make a living. This book teaches you how to make a start with permaculture.

  

Price : $18.78

Product Description

Garden Insects of North America is the most comprehensive and user-friendly guide to the common insects and mites affecting yard and garden plants in North America. In a manner no previous book has come close to achieving, through full-color photos and concise, clear, scientifically accurate text, it describes the vast majority of species associated with shade trees and shrubs, turfgrass, flowers and ornamental plants, vegetables, and fruits–1,420 of them, including crickets, katydids, fruit flies, mealybugs, moths, maggots, borers, aphids, ants, bees, and many, many more. For particularly abundant bugs adept at damaging garden plants, management tips are also included. Covering all of the continental United States and Canada, this is the definitive one-volume resource for amateur gardeners, insect lovers, and professional entomologists alike.

To ease identification, the book is organized by plant area affected (e.g., foliage, flowers, stems) and within that, by taxa. Close to a third of the species are primarily leaf chewers, with about the same number of sap suckers. Multiple photos of various life stages and typical plant symptoms are included for key species. The text, on the facing page, provides basic information on host plants, characteristic damage caused to plants, distribution, life history, habits, and, where necessary, how to keep pests in check–in short, the essentials to better understanding, appreciating, and tolerating these creatures.

Whether managing, studying, or simply observing insects, identification is the first step–and this book is the key. With it in hand, the marvelous microcosm right outside the house finally comes fully into view.

• Describes more than 1,400 species–twice as many as in any other field guide
• Full-color photos for most species–more than five times the number in most comparable guides
• Up-to-date pest management tips
• Organized by plant area affected and by taxa for easy identification
• Covers the continental United States and Canada
• Provides species level treatment of all insects and mites important to gardens
• Illustrates all life stages of key garden insects and commonly associated plant injuries
• Concise, clear, scientifically accurate text
• Comprehensive and user-friendly

Customer Reviews

Review date : 2008-11-01
If you are into gardening like I am, this is an excellent, colorful resource! It will help identify those interesting little bugs in your gardens. I only wish it had a section of natural preventions/controls to go along with each insect.

Review date : 2008-07-04
THIS WILL SHOW YOU THE REAL DEAL OF THE DOG EAT DOG UNIVERSE OF BUGS, IN YOUR FRONT AND BACKYARD……………

Review date : 2008-06-03
This is a great book it has wonderful pictures so that you may identify the bugs that you are looking for. I purchased one for myself and one for my daughter and we both love them.

Review date : 2008-05-05
I received this as a gift after I mentioned that I loved the Orkin insect zoo at the Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. It was not a book I would have bought for myself, but it has become indispensable bedtime reading! The pictures are vibrant and accompanied by hard-to-forget descriptions and explanations. I especially love the pictures taken by Whitney Cranshaw himself. This book is very accessible to those who are interested in the secret tiny life that exists off of their back porch, people who don’t know where to start and therefore keep pushing it off. Even the way the bugs are organized in the book is perfect- Leaf Chewers, Sap Suckers, Gall Makers, Twig Damagers, Branch Borers, Bulb Feeders… doesn’t this sound like the most beautiful poem in the world??

Review date : 2007-12-08
This bok is very inclusive in it’s content and very easy to look up insect for information or identification. It is used by Master Gardeners in our part of the country wth great appreciation for a book of such quality buyt yet affordble.