Will Bonsall's Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening: Innovative Techniques for Growing Vegetables,...

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Will Bonsall

Will Bonsall's Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening

Innovative Techniques for Growing Vegetables, Grains, and Perennial Food Crops with Minimal...

Will Bonsall

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English

Chelsea Green Publishing Co
28 May 2015

Self-sufficiency; Specialised gardening methods

"""If you wish to live well and eat well no matter what is going on in the rest of the world, this book is for you. . . .

Will Bonsall will help you enjoy the good life under any and all conditions.""-Eliot Coleman, author of The New Organic Grower

""Society does not generally expect its farmers to be visionaries."" Perhaps not, but longtime Maine farmer and homesteader Will Bonsall does possess a unique clarity of vision that extends all the way from the finer points of soil fertility and seed saving to exploring how we can transform civilization and make our world a better, more resilient place.

In Will Bonsall's Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening, Bonsall maintains that to achieve real wealth we first need to understand the economy of the land, to realize that things that might make sense economically don't always make sense ecologically, and vice versa. The marketplace distorts our values, and our modern dependence on petroleum in particular presents a serious barrier to creating a truly sustainable agriculture.

For him the solution is, first and foremost, greater self-reliance, especially in the areas of food and energy. By avoiding any off-farm inputs (fertilizers, minerals, and animal manures), Bonsall has learned how to practice a purely veganic, or plant-based, agriculture-not from a strictly moralistic or philosophical perspective, but because it makes good business sense: spend less instead of making more.

What this means in practical terms is that Bonsall draws upon the fertility of on-farm plant materials: compost, green manures, perennial grasses, and forest products like leaves and ramial wood chips. And he grows and harvests a diversity of crops from both cultivated and perennial plants: vegetables, grains, pulses, oilseeds, fruits and nuts-even uncommon but useful permaculture plants like groundnut (Apios).

Inside Will Bonsall's Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening you'll also find:

Milling, baking and sprouting Freezing and vermentation Best practices to handle plant disease and animal pests Collecting and storing seeds And so much more!

In a friendly, almost conversational way, Bonsall imparts a wealth of knowledge drawn from his more than forty years of farming experience.

""My goal,"" he writes, ""is not to feed the world, but to feed myself and let others feed themselves. If we all did that, it might be a good beginning."""

By: Will Bonsall
Imprint: Chelsea Green Publishing Co
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 254mm, Width: 204mm, Spine: 26mm
Weight: 1.089kg
ISBN: 9781603584425
ISBN 10: 1603584420
Pages: 400
Publication Date: 28 May 2015
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

"Will Bonsall has worn many hats since going ""back to the land,"" including prospector, draftsman, gravedigger, hobo, musician, logger, and artist, among others; however, he considers subsistence farming to be the only true career he ever had. He is the director of the Scatterseed Project, which he founded to help preserve our endangered crop-plant diversity. His first book, Through the Eyes of a Stranger (Xlibris, 2010), is an eco-novel set in a sustainable society of the future. Will lives and farms in Industry, Maine, with his wife, Molly Thorkildsen, and two sons."

Reviews for Will Bonsall's Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening: Innovative Techniques for Growing Vegetables, Grains, and Perennial Food Crops with Minimal Fossil Fuel and Animal Inputs

Eco-efficiency is the key new word and gardens-without-borders is the key new concept with which Will Bonsall illuminates 'this experiment we call civilization.' His view is wide and deep. You can accept his warm, witty invitation to explore the big questions. Or/and you can, with grace and ease, pluck out practical, hands-on directions as needed for all aspects of cyclical food production and use. I will read it again and again for reference, guidance, inspiration, and delight. --Eva Sommaripa, pioneering organic farmer at Eva's Garden in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and the hero of Wild Flavors by Didi Emmons