Category — Book

By Sharon Gamson Danks
New Village Press
Nov 2010

Sharon Gamson Danks, environmental planner and founding partner of Bay Tree Design, Inc. in Berkeley, California, has visited and documented over 175 green schoolyards in North America, Europe and Japan, and has shaped and facilitated the master planning process for dozens of ecological schoolyards.

Asphalt to Ecosystems is a compelling color guidebook for designing and building natural schoolyard environments that enhance childhood learning and play experiences while providing connection with the natural world.

[Read more →]

Essays about the founding and management of fifteen of the most influential student farms in North America.

Edited By Laura Sayre, Sean Clark
University Press of Kentucky
2011

Where will the next generation of farmers come from? What will their farms look like? Fields of Learning: The Student Farm Movement in North America provides a concrete set of answers to these urgent questions, describing how, at a wide range of colleges and universities across the United States and Canada, students, faculty, and staff have joined together to establish on-campus farms as outdoor laboratories for agricultural and cultural education. From one-acre gardens to five-hundred-acre crop and livestock farms, student farms foster hands-on food-system literacy in a world where the shortcomings of input-intensive conventional agriculture have become increasingly apparent. They provide a context in which disciplinary boundaries are bridged, intellectual and manual skills are cultivated together, and abstract ideas about sustainability are put to the test.

[Read more →]

How the White House Kitchen Garden Inspires Families, Schools and Communities – Forthcoming April 10, 2012

By Eddie Gehman Kohan
Obama Foodorama
Oct 24, 2011

Excerpts:

In the book, which is more than likely to be a bestseller, Mrs. Obama will describe how daughters Malia, 13, and Sasha, 10, “were the catalysts for change for their family’s eating behavior which inspired her national initiative to address childhood obesity and resulted in the idea to plant a vegetable garden on the South Lawn,” according to Crown’s publicity blurb. The book will include recipes from the White House chefs, as well as resources on gardening and other food access projects.

[Read more →]

City-Slicker Resources For Growing, Raising, Sourcing, Trading, And Preparing What You Eat

By Annette Cottrell, Joshua McNichols
Mountaineers Books (October 3, 2011)
Paperback: 288 pages

Community, health, home—it all comes back to food. Written by busy city slickers, The Urban Farm Handbook uses personal success stories, charts, grocery lists, recipes, and more to help readers choose options and make a game plan for weaning themselves off of the commercial supermarket. As urbanites who have learned how to do everything from grinding spelt grains and curing meat to collaborating with neighbors on a food bartering system, the authors share their own transformative food experiences with their families—Joshua talks about taking his son to a fall chicken slaughter workshop, and Annette shares how fresh foods helped ease her young son’s behavioral problems.

[Read more →]

By Mary Quattlebaum
Illustrated by Laura J. Bryant
Dawn Pubns (March 1, 2012)

Old MacDonald had a … garden? Yes! Sing along with young Jo MacDonald as she grows healthy food for people and wild creatures. E-I-E-I-O! Find out how butterflies, bumblebees, and birds help a garden to thrive—and how you can help them too. And keep an eye on one mysterious plant. What will it become? Youngsters learn about garden ecosystems and stewardship through this playful adaptation of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”

[Read more →]

By Lynne Cherry
Blue Sky Press
2003

Review by Shelle Rosenfeld
American Library Association

Little Groundhog loves eating from the neighbor’s vegetable garden–maybe too much. Perhaps it’s time he planted his own garden and, fortunately, Squirrel is willing to show him how. The two animals collect seeds, store them, and after winter hibernation and spring thaw, plant and tend them. By summer, Little Groundhog is joyfully harvesting and eating what they sowed. And such a plentiful harvest calls for sharing, bringing a wonderful Thanksgiving feast for all to enjoy.

[Read more →]

By Susan Grigsby
Albert Whitman & Company
Forthcoming: February 1, 2012
32 pages

Maya loves contests, so she is excited when her teacher announces they will plant a school garden like Thomas Jefferson’s garden at Monticello–and they’ll have a “First Peas to the Table” contest, just like Jefferson and his neighbors had each spring. Maya plants her pea seeds with a secret head start –found in Jefferson’s Garden Book– and keeps careful notes in her garden journal.

[Read more →]

By Susan Grigsby
Albert Whitman & Company
32 pages
Sep 1 2010

Sally is a young girl living in rural Alabama in the early 1900s, a time when people were struggling to grow food in soil that had been depleted by years of cotton production. One day, Dr. George Washington Carver shows up to help the grownups with their farms and the children with their school garden.

[Read more →]

Forthcoming February 15, 2012

By Jennifer Cockrall-king
Prometheus Books
15 Feb 2012

About the Author:
Jennifer Cockrall-King (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) is a freelance journalist and niche food writer whose work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, National Post, Canadian Geographic, Maclean’s, and other major publications. She is also a contributor to A Good Catch: Sustainable Seafood Recipes from Canada’s Top Chefs, and she is the former cofounder, publisher, and editor of The Edible Prairie Journal.

When you’re standing in the midst of a supermarket, it’s hard to imagine that you’re looking at a failing industrial food system. The abundance all around you looks impressive but is really a facade. In fact, there’s just a three-day supply of food available for any given city due to complex, just-in-time international supply chains. The system is not only vulnerable, given the reality of food scares, international crises, terrorist attacks, economic upheavals, and natural disasters, but it is also environmentally unsustainable for the long term.

[Read more →]

An Algonquin Happy Book – No. 157

By Gladys Nelson Muter
Illustrated by F.Y. Cory
Algonquin Publishing Co.
1924

This charming, vintage book tells the story of some hungry bunnies and their love of vegetables.

[Read more →]

Forthcoming December 27, 2011

By Novella Carpenter, Willow Rosenthal
Publisher: Penguin
December 27, 2011
592 pages

From Ghost Town Farm blog – Novella Carpenter:
My new book is coming out December 27 (hmm, right around the baby coming)! Willow Rosenthal and I have been slaving on this giant how-to book for the past three years or something. It’s called “The Essential Urban Farmer”. It’s got everything a budding or experienced urban farmer might want to know about growing veggies and fruit, securing land, and raising livestock in the city.

[Read more →]

We’re chopped for hash and fixed for mash to make potato crust

Pictures by Florence Kate Upton
Verses by Bertha Upton
Longman’s. Green & Co.
1897

The Vege-men’s Revenge, first published in 1897, features Poppy, a little girl, who is coaxed by Don Tomato and Herr Carrot to Vege-men’s Land, where she is buried on the promise that this will make her grow. Poppy sleeps through a nightmare of all the chopping, boiling, etc., that makes vegetables edible and eventually awakes to take this same sort of revenge on the stuff in her garden.

[Read more →]

40 urban agriculture projects, created by designers from the United States and around the world

By Mark Gorgolewski, June Komisar, and Joe Nasr
The Monacelli Press
Hardcover Available September 20, 2011

Appealing to both design professionals and individuals curious about current ideas and initiatives for growing food in close proximity to the point of consumption, CARROT CITY: Creating Places for Urban Agriculture by Mark Gorgolewski, June Komisar, and Joe Nasr presents 40 projects, created by designers from the United States and around the world, that explore innovative approaches to making space for urban food production.

[Read more →]

By Amy Pennington
Sasquatch Books (April 1, 2011)
192 pages

Grow squash on your patio, flowers in your window box, and pick blackberries from your parking strip. Apartment Gardening details how to start a garden in the heart of the city. From building your own planter box to sprouting seeds in jars on the counter, every small space is plantable. Beginning and experienced gardeners will discover how to save money on produce and impress friends with their newly-tenacious green thumbs.

[Read more →]

The author homesteads in Denver with her chickens, goats, bees, and organic front yard garden.

By Sundari Elizabeth Kraft
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Alpha; Original edition (June 7, 2011)
(If there’s an “Idiot’s Guide”, we’ve come a long way! Mike)

A note from Sundari Elizabeth Kraft from her web site:

Last August I was approached by the editors from Penguin Publishing, who oversee “The Complete Idiot’s Guide” books. Despite their goofy-sounding titles, I’ve always been a fan of the Idiot’s Guides. I like the way they’re structured, and I feel like I’m getting comprehensive information when I read them.

The editors asked me if I would write the book, and what followed was a period that was both challenging and immensely rewarding.

[Read more →]

By John Jackson
JJ Books
3rd Revised edition edition (May 23, 2011)
236 pages

A Little Piece of England, tells the tale of how the author’s family, living in a sliver of countryside in London’s commuter belt, came, over some ten years, to make itself, in its ‘spare time’, self-sufficient in its requirements of milk, meat, eggs, vegetables and some fruit.

[Read more →]

Author holding her book.

A memoir of a year feeding her family from her suburban garden

By Spring Warren
Seal Press
Published March 15, 2011
336 pages

Permaculture Media Blog says:
When Spring Warren told her husband and two teenage boys that she wanted to grow 75 percent of all the food they consumed for one year—and that she wanted to do it in their yard—they told her she was crazy. She did it anyway.

The Quarter-Acre Farm is Warren’s account of deciding—despite all resistance—to take control of her family’s food choices, get her hands dirty, and create a garden in her suburban yard.

[Read more →]

Peter Ladner, in his yard that he converted into a food garden, has written a book that details the changes people and policymakers in Canada are making to regain control of our food. Photograph by: Jenelle Schneider, PNG, Vancouver Sun.

Former Vancouver councillor offers ideas on how cities can gain control over what they eat

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
July 28, 2011

Excerpt:

What would a city approaching food self-sufficiency look like?

Peter Ladner’s soon-to-be released book The Urban Food Revolution offers tantalizing glimpses of urban environments that successfully integrate commercial enterprise, low-impact living spaces and agricultural productivity. Balcony gardens, urban market gardens, rooftop beehives, vertical greenhouses and aquaponics, and acres of lawn converted to high-value herb and vegetable production are all being employed with success somewhere. Why not everywhere?

[Read more →]

New Book

By Andrés Duany
The Prince’s Foundation/DPZ
2011

The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment is proud to present: Garden Cities: Theory & Practice of Agrarian Urbanism by renowned US urbanist Andrés Duany, the fifth in its series of Senior Fellow Books.

Agrarian urbanism refers to settlements where the society is involved with food in all its aspects: organizing, growing, processing, distributing, cooking and eating it. A primary distinction of Agricultural Urbanism is that the physical pattern of the settlement supports an intentional agrarian society.

[Read more →]

SPIN-Farming Basics: Thinking of Farming? Think again. There is a new way to farm

By Wally Satzewich, Roxanne Christensen
January 31, 2011
SPIN Farming LLC, 112 pages
(On Amazon “Search Inside the Book”)

You have a calling to farm but you have no money, no land and no farming experience. No problem. Be a SPIN farmer! SPIN-Farming Basics contains the step-by step learning guides to the sub-acre farming production system that makes it possible to earn $50,000 gross from a half-acre. The guides provide everything you need to get operational and profitable quickly – a business concept, farm design, infrastructure and equipment, investments, detailed day-to-day workflow, crop selection, revenue targets and marketing guidance.

[Read more →]