A Life in the Garden
Tales and Tips for Growing Food in Every Season
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
“Drawing on a lifetime of organic gardening, Barbara Damrosch collects her lessons learned and wisdom gained into an easy-to-read-and-enjoy overview of kitchen gardening. For the new gardener, there is encouragement on top of nuts-and-bolts advice. For every gardener, there is inspiration to face the challenges inherent in a life deeply rooted in and fed from the garden.” —American Gardener
In A Life in the Garden, horticultural icon Barbara Damrosch imparts a lifetime of wisdom on growing food for herself and her family. In writing that's accessible, engaging, and elegant, she welcomes us to garden alongside her. Personal, thoughtful, and often humorous, this book offers practical DIY insights that will delight gardeners, cooks, and small-scale farmers. With a personal and sometimes irreverent tone, Barbara expresses the pleasure she takes in gardening, the sense of empowerment she finds in it, and the importance of a partnership with the real expert: nature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Damrosch (The Four Season Farm Gardener's Cookbook), a former Washington Post gardening columnist, provides a robust introduction to growing fruits, herbs, legumes, and vegetables. She recommends placing garden plots in places that get six hours of sun per day and details how to get the right pH level and nutrient balance in soil (adding pulverized limestone lowers acidity, and cottonseed meal boosts nitrogen levels). Damrosch's organic approach urges readers to refrain from using pesticides; she explains that such "pests" as yellowjackets and moles actually tamp down insect populations that would otherwise overrun crops. The bulk of the book offers detailed instructions on growing beans, cucumbers, raspberries, and other edible plants. For instance, she recommends installing wire cylinders around tomato vines so they'll climb upward and away from soilborne diseases, and she encourages covering lettuce plants with shade cloth to prevent them from growing into unwieldy stalks. The advice on working with nature, rather than striving to control it, is well observed, and Damrosch has an amusing habit of anthropomorphizing plants ("In a cold, wet spring... my basil will sulk outside the kitchen door, ‘palely loitering,' as Keats would say"). This stands out in the crowded field of gardening primers.
