The Good Garden
How to Nurture Pollinators, Soil, Native Wildlife, and Healthy Food—All in Your Own Backyard
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- 32,99 €
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- 32,99 €
Descripción editorial
What makes a garden good? For Chris McLaughlin, it’s about growing the healthiest, most scrumptious fruits and veggies possible, but it’s also about giving back. How can your little patch of Earth become a sanctuary for threatened wildlife, sequester carbon, and nurture native plants?
McLaughlin gives you all the tricks and tips you need to grow the sustainable garden of your dreams. Drawing from established traditions, such as permaculture and French intensive gardening, and McLaughlin’s hard-earned experience, The Good Garden is a joyful guide for newbies and experienced gardeners alike. It will teach you the fundamentals, including how to choose the right plant varieties for your microclimate, and proven methods to fight pests without chemicals. You will also discover the nuances of developing a green thumb, from picking species to attract specific types of pollinators to composting techniques based on time available. Lovely four-color photography will show you good gardening in action.
Most importantly, The Good Garden will help you foster a sense of meaning in your garden. Maybe the goal is to reduce food miles and plastic waste by growing delicious berries. Maybe it’s to meet neighbors who also care about the planet through a seed-swap. Maybe it’s a quiet moment patting the bunny whose manure will replace toxic fertilizers in the soil. A good garden offers endless possibilities and The Good Garden offers a wealth of knowledge and inspiration.
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Master gardener McLaughlin (Vertical Vegetable Gardening) compiles a greatest-hits of sustainable gardening ideas in this somewhat cursory outing. Driven by the desire to "restore and replenish the land that is restoring and replenishing me," the author encourages readers to make use of regenerative gardening practices to improve soil, promote biodiversity, and protect local waterways. McLaughlin explains a wealth of gardening philosophies, including permaculture ("living in harmony with nature"), biodynamic gardening (in which a garden is "an organism unto itself"), and French intensive methods (in which "crops are planted up to five times closer" than normal). She also suggests looking to the natural world for solutions to common gardening problems: one can combat pests by cultivating a healthy population of insects, birds, and bats, for example, while covering bare ground goes a long way in reducing weeds, preventing erosion, maintaining moisture, and insulating plant roots. McLaughlin's commitment to stewardship runs deep, but here she spreads herself a bit thin, touching on many topics but not really digging into any of them. The frequent stock photos, meanwhile, don't show her ideas in action. Less a detailed how-to than a chatty why-do-it, this is likely to leave readers wanting.
