Food Matters

A Practical Application of “In Defence of Food”

Now that I’ve finished reading Food Matters, I’m reading Michael Pollen’s book In Defense of Food for the same project.  On the cover of that book is Pollen’s current mantra:  Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.  What’s great about Bittman’s book (aside-don’t you love it that a food writer is named bittman?  I do.) is that he gives some of the information and statistics found in other books about eating a mostly plant based diet, but then he tells you how to do that.  It is great to know that growing your own food or eating more grains than meat reduces carbon emissions.  But, how do you eat more grains and less meat?  What do you eat, besides oatmeal?  Oat groats.  That is my new favorite word. I could say it all day long: oat groats, oat groats, oat groats.

Oat groats are pretty much the same thing as oatmeal, but they aren’t rolled, so they aren’t flat.  They also have all of the good stuff left in them-fiber, etc.  They are healthy, when simmered in water with just a pinch of salt, and don’t have all of the preservatives and sweetners of most store-bought oatmeal.  Plus, they are CHEAP.  I bought enough oat groats for my husband and me to eat once a day for five days for ONE DOLLAR at my local Co-Op.  You can add almost anything to them-make them sweet or savory.  I remembered that part of the interview on NPR, so that was the first practical thing I implemented after reading the book.  I remember Bittman telling the host that he could survive on “dressed up oatmeal” if necessary.

Easy Recipes that Actually Look Good

Does it make you a wacko if you eat oat groats?  Not any more!  Because being “Green” is all the rage, nobody changing their life to save themselves and save the earth will be pestered.  That’s great news.  The better news is that it is possible to eat food, not too much, mostly plants and still enjoy your food!  That’s a central premise of both books.  Stop looking at “nutrients” and start eating food.  You’ll have fewer weight problems, and less dietary headache when you eat food, not too much, mostly plants because the foods have high nutrient density per calorie eaten.  (That’s a fancy way of saying that fruits and vegetables take up a lot of space in the fridge, give you the essential nutrients, but don’t have tons of calories.)

How do these recipes sound for heathy yumminess?

• Roasted vegetables
• Root vegetable chips
• Brown bag popcorn
• Impromptu Fried Rice
• Spinach and Sweet Potato Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing
• Stuffed Chicken Breasts with Pan-Grilled Corn
• No Bake Fruit Tarts
• Nutty Oatmeal Cookies
• Super-Simple Sorbet

And, I can assure you, the list of ingredients is not 30 items long.  You can find everything at your local grocery story or Co-Op, and I doubt you’d go away hungry after eating these. I love to watch Rachel Ray, but I can’t deal with her recipes that require visiting six different grocery stores and having a kitchen the size of my house.  (She says her meals are 30 minutes, but that’s after you have assembled an aresenal of hard to find herbs, spices, plants, meats, pans, etc.)

Lose Weight; Feel Great

I have tried every diet around.  I have tried every exercise plan.  I have, literally, tried everything to find a balance for my life in terms of eating, exercise and budget.  I’m liking this book more and more every day because it describes a way of eating that will help my health, my budget and the environment in one fell swoop, and while Bittman says you’ll probably lose weight eating this way, it isn’t a diet, it is a way of living.  Normally.  With actual yummy, real, whole food.  And plants.  The beginning of the book is a little scary-numbers of any sort usually are, but it sets up a good argument for trying the recipes in the back.  I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who likes to eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Or, anyone who likes to eat.

{this article was originally published in 2009}

Neatly Encapsulating my Husband’s Kitchen Philosophy

Author Peterson says that there’s no such thing as a green thumb.  Well, I don’t believe her.  My Mother-in-Law, Susan, has the greenest thumb of pretty much anyone I know (sorry Mom! and Grandma!).  She routinely coaxes the orchids we send her back into bloom, and has HUGE avocado plants, papayas and other tropical monstrosities growing in her sunroom, all from the pits of a fruit purchased at the grocery store.  I believe that her indoor jungle is why my husband, bless his heart, NEVER wants to let a seed or pit go without trying to sprout it.  I don’t think he knows that I have this book yet, but he will once he reads the blog.  I’ll be sure to report back with pictures of his forthcoming experiments. With Peterson’s thorough explanation of how to grow “68 Windowsill Plants from Kitchen Scraps,” anyone, even my husband, should be successful.

“One to Eat and One to Plant”

This little book was really a labor of love for the two authors, who met at a lecture about Pits that Peterson was giving.  Selsam and Peterson became best friends, and set off on a journey through New York City’s ethnic markets to find interesting plants to grow.  This was all around the early 1970s.  The new addition takes into account that things have changed, and more fruits and vegetables for experimenting are available at conventional grocery stores.  When they began their adventure of buying, eating and growing weird plants, the ladies adopted the philosophy “always buy two-one to eat and one to grow.”  If one was out and about without the other, she would buy four, so each could have two for eating and experimenting.  I love that!

Easy Instructions and Surprising Results

Some of the plants described in this book won’t produce fruit or vegetables for you, but, rather, are fun to grow on for a few months as unusual houseplants-an antidote to peace lilies in every corner of the house.  The first section of the book describes basic horticultural information for a novice grower.  The next section covers propagation, or how to take the seed, pit, root or stem of the plant you have and get it to sprout into a new plant.  The final chapters detail different types of plants and how to grow them. In addition to a good primer on how to grow weird plants, this little book is also an interesting source of information about where the food we eat comes from.

Is it Organic?

So, I hate to even put this in my review, but since I’m reviewing it for an organic gardening blog, I have to mention this:  the book does detail how to create a “moist, humid environment” for pit sprouting by using peat moss or sphagnum moss, both of which are not environmentally friendly.  I’m wondering if we could get the same result with perlite or vermiculite?  I might give that a whirl.

All in all, I think this is a cool little book for people who enjoy tinkering with houseplants.  And, because of its great price, you can get one to keep and one to share with a friend.

Wicked Plants

The Plant that Killed Lincoln’s Mother and other Botanical Atrocities

That’s the subtitle.  It promises all kinds of fun, especially near Halloween.  The plant that killed Lincoln’s mother was Eupatorium rugosum, white snakeroot.  If a cow ate this weed, it would pass along the poisons in the plant through its milk.  People who drank this milk were said to have “milk sickness.”  The symptoms:  weakness, vomiting, tremors and delirium.  Sounds LOVELY.  It is possible to buy cultivars of this plant in the garden center, notably Eupatorium rugosum ‘Chocolate’ which has dark leaves.

Here are some other delightful plants described in this book, which are probably in your home garden:

• Aconite, also called “monkshood” because the purple flowers are shaped like hoods.  This beauty causes paralysis, and stops the heart.
• Oleander, which causes nausea and vomiting, slowed heart rate and other symptoms, is common in southern gardens.  If you have kids, DON’T PLANT THIS IN YOUR GARDEN.
• Yew, which is THE FOUNDATION PLANT OF CHOICE around houses built during the 1970s and 1980s, has toxic seeds, leaves, stems, etc.

Try to Control Your Terror

If you pick up this book, you might be afraid to plant a garden or let your kids run around outside.  Right after the book came out, there was even some pretty heated discussion about whether plants should be labeled as poisonous.  The books is a handy little reference if you are a serious gardener and want to stay away from poisonous, weedy or otherwise unpleasant plants.  On the flip side, the author has a poisonous plants garden at her house, and you can too, by finding the varieties discussed in the book.

In addition to discussing plants that are poisonous to humans and pets, Stewart also highlights plants that are invasive, weedy, and, in the case of Kudzu, plants that have basically smothered an entire region of the country.  It is a fun and functional book.  I enjoy reading the back stories and historical information about the notorious plants I already know are poisonous, and I learned some new stuff, too!

Pretty Pictures

A bonus in Wicked Plants are the botanical etchings by Briony Morrow-Cribbs and the drawings by Jonathon Rosen.  Both add to the overall creepy atmosphere of the book, which is great for a conversation piece or coffee table book in addition to a reference.

If you want to watch the AWESOME trailer video for the book, visit Amy’s website.  If you’re one of the, like, THREE people in the WORLD who don’t already have this book well, get it from us!  You won’t be sorry, (cue cackling laughter) heh heh.

Four Hours of Corn

This book is not for the faint of heart.  In terms of its length, its subject matter and its sometimes wordy, but always thorough treatment of each subject, The Omnivore’s Dilemma isn’t just a book, it’s a project.  It was kind of fitting and kind of strange to listen to the first few chapters of the book while driving through the cornfields.  That’s because the first few chapters are all about corn:  how we grow it, why we grow so much of it, the way it is in almost everything we eat, and how it is ruining our lives.

The premise of The Omnivore’s Dilemma is this:  Michael Pollan, writer, thinker, plant-lover, food promoter, sets out to answer the question “What should we have for dinner?”  The answer to this question is complicated, today, by an almost infinite number of choices and/or obligations:  McDonald’s, the farmer’s market, Whole Foods, the farm down the street, Costco.  Organic or conventional?  Local or cheap? Local and cheap?  Food from people we know or food bought from a warehouse?  How on earth does anyone decide?  And, how on earth can anyone decide when most of us don’t understand exactly what is in a box of cheerios, versus a loaf of bread we make ourselves.  How do we choose what to eat if we can’t recognize a whole grain without a food label.  Why do whole grains need a label?

Three Modern Food Chains

In order to help answer the question “What should we eat for dinner?” Pollan traces three meals through three different food chains:  Industrial (largely centering on corn),  Pastoral (largely centering on grass), and Personal (foraging and hunting in the forest).  The meal at the end of the Industrial food chain is fast food, eaten in a moving vehicle.  At the end of Pastoral, Grass-fed or grass-derived ingredients.  At the end of Personal, what Pollan calls “The Perfect Meal.”  Hm.  During the course of the book, Pollan goes behind the scenes of the modern industrial agricultural food chain:  huge subsidized fields of corn and soybeans, giant feedlots and manure, and our drive-through nation.

Between the drive-through and the pasture-fed, Pollan takes a saunter through Big Organic, the large industrial organic farms-Cascadian and Earthbound Organic.  We learn that many of their processes aren’t so different from Big Ag.  The inputs are different (compost and manure instead of synthetic liquid fertilizer), but the process of farming is not.

The Pastoral section was my favorite part of the book.  During his research for that section, Pollan visited a biodynamic farm in Virginia.  This farm was almost a contained system of animals, plants and water.

The last section of the book, the Personal, was the least understandable to me, mainly because it didn’t involve much farming or growing, and I’m a horticulturist.  I grow stuff to eat.  I don’t go to the woods and dig it up.  That, quite frankly, scares the crap out of me.

Taste the Difference

Does food taste better if we know it was grown by fairly compensated workers toiling in safe conditions?  Does it taste better from our own garden, or the local farmer’s market, or from the big box warehouse?  Can you tell the difference between grain fed and grass fed beef?  After a summer of reading and thinking and tasting and growing and visiting, I believe that, yes, you can taste the difference between the far-flung industrial and the local sustainable harvest.  And, I think, local tastes better.  It also, I learned, or re-confirmed, is better for the economy and the environment.  If I want a nice place for my (eventual) kids to live, my neighbors and I need to make some changes.  We need to “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” as Pollan advised in his followup to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the book In Defense of Food.

Over the summer of salad days and hamburger days, I’ve found that I’m no more hungry on the days I eat a lot of fruits and veggies than on the days when I eat more meat and, well, fried crap.  I’ve thought about the C4 carbon form in corn, while I’m drinking a soda (made with corn syrup) or chewing gum (made with corn derivatives), or eating corn on the cob (corn).

The First Step is Awareness

Isn’t the first step in a 12 step program admitting that there’s something wrong?  Well, there is something wrong, I *personally* believe, with the industrial agricultural system.  The thing I’ve liked most about all four books I’ve read and reviewed this summer is that none of them are preachy.  They are all more interested in creating awareness, relying on the readers to analyze and take action.  Their message is easier to swallow that way.

To escape the turmoil of her upbringing, she moved to Chicago straight out of high school-at 17 years old.  She married, had a daughter, divorced, and worked her way up through the business world, eventually making a large salary, working unsustainable hours and battling severe allergies, chronic fatigue, endometriosis, high blood pressure, and a myriad of other ailments.  Gardening saved her.

While that might sound like an overstatement, according to Coronado, it’s not.  After years of learning how to heal herself, she wrote and published her book, Gardening Nude, which is both a personal account of the healing benefits of the outdoors, and a collection of case studies of similar experiences.

About Life, not just Gardening

Gardening Nude is not just a book about gardening, though gardening plays a large part.  As with many other local food production/gardening volumes, community building and environmental awareness are key components of Shawna’s Get Your Green on Healthy Philosophy.  After years of battling stress, fatigue and other health problems caused by “conventional” life (long hours at work, little time outside, meals grabbed on the go), Coronado “got naked” (in her own words), and discovered how to put the pieces of her life back together by, literally, going back to nature.  Her philosophy has three key principles:

• Go Green Health Plan
  • Exercise regularly
  • Eat whole, nutritious foods
    • Limit processed sugars (white sugar, white flower, white rice), caffeine, alcohol, and non-natural fats
• Green and Simple Conservation Plan
  • Recycle
  • Purchase recycled products
  • Conserve water
  • Compost
  • Buy local-food, clothing, anything possible
  • Participate in community conservation
• Building a Green Community Plan
  • Plant a community garden
  • Participate in local beautification efforts
  • Advocate for outdoor spaces and natural areas within the community

The book is divided into four parts, with the three major parts detailing each principle with an explanation of the principle, a well-researched set of arguments for letting go of excuses and making the principle a reality in your own life, and “Naked Action,” or real-life case studies and examples of the principle in action.

We Don’t Get Enough Green

Coronado recognized, and has articulated in her book, something everyone feels, even if they are not consciously aware of it:  people need to be outdoors – taking in the sunshine.  They need to fuel their bodies with nutritious, healthy food.  Food packed with vitamins, minerals and phyto-chemicals, not just calories.  People crave interaction with others, and build support systems to care for each other.

She has recognized that industrial agriculture, modern food distribution, and the “rat race” economy have conspired to keep people inside, in cars, and away from the health benefits of the outdoors.  Her “Get Your Green on Healthy Philosophy” is not composed of radical activities outside the realm of normal human activity.  It is, rather an organized way to experience nature and community, while helping the environment, for the benefit of personal and collective healthy.  Gardening Nude is a handbook with ideas, and a blueprint for how to live, not just eat.

More than a Book

Shawna isn’t just an author-she is a gardening/life/community guru.  Her website, The Casual Gardener, is a delightful place to visit!  Mosey over and take a look.  You’ll be glad you did!

Recipe Detour

The book has lots of fabulous recipes that I can’t wait to try, but the book itself, and its premise, inspired me to invent something yummy for lunch today, and I want to share that recipe with all of you. You’ll love it.

Ingredients:

1 cup cooked pasta

4 cups raw spinach leaves

1 teaspoon olive oil

1 teaspoon butter

1 tablespoon crumbled blue cheese

Direction:  melt the butter and olive oil together in a skillet.  Rinse the spinach leaves and add to skillet.  Cover and steam until they start to turn brilliant green.  Then add the pasta and a pinch of salt.  Stir until spinach is just wilting.  Pour into bowl.  Toss with blue cheese. Eat!

Total yumminess.  (I killed my blender after a month of smoothies, so the green smoothie monster is going back to its cave until I figure out what to do.  In the meantime, I have a LOT of spinach that I need to find ways to creatively eat.)

Back to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

So, Kingsolver, you might remember, wrote The Poisonwood Bible, a runaway international best seller that everyone in their right mind has a copy of.  No? Really?  Well, go get one now, because it is a wonderful book-actually deserving of its bestseller status.  She grew up in Kentucky, but moved to the desert of Tucson after college.  She and her family alternated between school years in Tucson and summers at the farm for years, until they decided that the water situation in the desert made them nervous, at which point they moved home to the farm.  Their first year was spent fixing up the farmhouse to the point where it could serve as a full time residence, then outlining a plan for their new life.  Next, they quit industrial agriculture, cold turkey, and bought a bunch of (live) turkeys.

Eating What’s in Season

The “year of food life” described in the book chronicles the family’s switch from consuming anything they wanted at any time of the year to eating what was in season around their county.  That means: no oranges, no mangoes, no bananas.  No cucumbers or tomatoes in winter, no lettuce in August.  Sounds rough.  However, what that does mean is pure joy and gratitude to taste the first cherry of the summer.  Only just tiring of asparagus when it’s time to let the plant grow after two weeks of harvesting every day.  Eating zucchini in every way imaginable: pasta, bread, dip, cookies, sorbet, etc.  It means knowing where your food came from, and feeling good about every speck eaten.

“We’ll Only Kill the Mean Ones”

This is probably one of my favorite quotes of the book.  It comes from Lily, the youngest daughter, age six or seven during the year chronicled in this book.  She raised chickens in Tucson-laying hens-and will raise them again in Virginia.  Each chicken flock can only have one rooster, so a “ruling the roost” rooster audition commences once Lily’s new chicks are old enough to start showing their true feathers-male or female.  A good rooster needs to have protective tendencies, but also get along with its human caretakers, apparently.  Only one would make the cut.  Er, the job.  At first, Kingsolver didn’t think Lily would stomach raising chickens for eggs and meat.  Then, Lily decided she wanted a horse, and calculated that she could save up her half of the money faster by selling chickens in both forms.

A New View of Vegetarianism

I am not, and probably never will be, a vegetarian.  Some people are due to health reasons.  Others don’t eat meat on moral grounds.  I finished reading the chapter about chicken and turkey “harvesting” last night, and it has given me more to think about in terms of eating an omnivorous diet.  (My next read:  Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Delimma )  Kingsolver argues that animals raised humanely–outside of containment agricultural facilities (prisons?)-are responsible food choices.  She brings up a point that I had never considered, but feel like I should have:  millions of insects, bunny rabbits, butterflies, moles, voles, birds and other animals are killed in large-scale commercial agriculture.  The food produced on those farms are no more environmentally friendly, whether organic or conventionally operated.  Mixed use farms, growing food for local residents, are more environmentally friendly, and produce healthier eating options.

Local or Organic-Which is better?

In the long run, the philosophy of organic growing-building the soil, planting mixed-use farms and gardens, and working with, not against, the local climate matters more than a USDA label slapped on a package of lettuce.  Locally grown produce uses less fuel for transportation, and is picked at the peak of freshness.  If you have to choose between buying local and buying organic, if you know your local producer practices organic methods, even if the farm is not certified, its better to go with local.

Why do I love this book so much?  The writing is beautiful.  I have learned a lot by reading it, but don’t feel like I am slogging through some wacky environmentalist rant.  It makes me want to eat Swiss Chard and kale by the basket-fulls.  It has inspired me to find more local food sources.  It might even get me out of bed at 8:00 am Saturday to get to the Farmer’s Market before everything good is gone.  It’s a great read.

A Gardening Book for History Buffs

A lot of plant lovers enjoy knowing about every aspect of their plants.  Not just how to grow them, but where they came from, who they inspired and how they were used throughout the ages.  Plants in Garden History is the ultimate book for plant loving historians or history loving gardeners.  It starts with the beginning of gardening in recorded history of Western Civilization.  (In the introduction, Hobhouse rightly explains that the history of plants in Eastern Garden History is entirely separate, and entirely different.  It would make a great book, in and of itself!)  This book details gardening styles from ancient Egypt, through historic gardens of Persia, including the Alhambra, Europe in the Renaissance, French Formal Gardens, and Colonial America.  You learn, along with the principles of garden design, the history that influenced historic design.  For garden lovers, reading this book is like a baseball lover learning Western Civ. by reading an architectural retrospective of great baseball stadiums.  You get the important highlights of overall history, framed by a topic that actually interests you.

Plants + Design

These days, you find a lot of gardening books that are organized around design principles, rather than plant combinations.  Hobhouse’s book traces the interconnected relationship between bringing new plants to cultivation and garden design during a “new” plant’s introduction.  For each period and plant discussed, Hobhouse traces the evolution of a plant from curiosity to sought-after prize, to a widely available ornamental, concurrent with popular garden designs of the time period.  The history of ornamental bulbs in the garden is one interesting example.  When originally brought from gardens in the Middle East, bulbs were treated as specimen plants, grown a few at a time, literally on pedestals.  As they became slightly more available, they were inter-planted in the formal parterres and knot gardens popular at the time.  By the time bulbs were standard in gardens, the more naturalistic style of gardening was popular, at which point the “naturalizing” of bulbs became common practice.

A “Cultivated Wild”

Gardens started as a place to grow food.  They evolved into pleasure grounds.  Today, they are a hybrid of both.  As building and development have eaten up more and more natural spaces, and there is little “wild” land left in areas where the most dense populations live, gardening attitudes have shifted.  Wild plants, once fenced out, are cultivated and brought in.  The pendulum of interest in exotics swings wildly from left to right: one year, horticulture is all about tropical plants and the next few are all about natives.  A great quote from Plants in Garden History sums up the emotional and design tug-of-war that happens for all serious gardeners:

“The conflict between a delight in logical rhythms of planting and in more natural free effects-between considering the art of gardening as ‘nature perfected’ and using gardening to re-interpret the roles of plants in order to imitate the wild-remains as topical today, when whole landscapes are threatened, as it has through the ages. . . There is no right or wrong way to use plants. . . In the hands of an individual who appreciates plants and sees the garden as an entity, the form of the layout and the character of the plants become inseparable. . . ”

Perspective for the Modern Gardener

Just as reading history books helps world leaders frame their attempts to govern in today’s world, so does the information in Plants in Garden History help gardeners.  It is easy to get caught up in the latest fad, or feel guilty if one is completely uninterested in what is being heralded as “the next big thing.”  Going from tulip mania to tropical mania to native plant mania has happened not once, not twice, but many times in the history of gardening.  If you despair that your Victory Garden isn’t as lush as your neighbor’s, or you feel sub-par because you don’t even want to plant a vegetable garden this year, even though “everyone is doing it,” take a stroll through Plants in Garden History.  Within its pages, you might find the next “new” horticultural development.

What is Organic Gardening?

The other day, while talking to Chris about a gardening questions from someone, I started spouting off re: my views about what organic gardening really is.  Yes, you can buy stuff at the grocery with the label “organic” on it.  That stuff was grown according to rigid FDA guidelines.  Does that mean anything, really?  I don’t think so.  Just because you follow a bunch of rules set by a government agency  does not mean you are really helping the environment.  Just because you can read a list of prohibited substances does not mean you are sustainable in your agricultural methods.  The organic label is available only for FDA inspected producers.  However, any home gardener can be an organic gardener-label or no label.  Being an organic gardener is more of a state of mind than a set of rules.

Harmony and Balance in the System

What happens when you get a cold?  Your system gets “out of whack.”  How about when you eat too much spicy food?  Your stomach revolts.  If you keep your child up too late?  He gets cranky.  Gardens and yards are the same.  In regular, wild, uncultivated settings, ecosystems (communities of plants, animals and organisms) reach an equilibrium.  If something happens to disrupt the equilibrium, the system eventually rights itself.

Gardening, and yard maintenance is a major disruption of equilibrium of the natural ecosystem.  Monocultures wreak havoc with the system, whether they are organically farmed or not.  Organic gardening is much more about a holistic approach, and an eye toward letting the system balance itself, as much as possible.  No, it isn’t natural for radishes and tomatoes to be growing right next to each other.  They don’t come from the same place.  However, a garden of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, chives, sage and marigolds growing together, interspersed with each other is a much closer approximation of a healthy forest community with lots of different species living together, than is a field of corn.

The principles of organic gardening are to maintain the system-not the plant.  Don’t solve individual problems, keep the entire system functioning.  Build the soil, encourage beneficial insects, plant things together that help each other.  Whenever I have a problem in my yard or garden, first I try to see what is going wrong in the overall system, and restore order.  Sometimes, I just ignore the problem and work itself out.  (Pest populations will escalate and crash, eventually, if left alone.)

Eat According to the Season

When you take care of your own garden, you determine your threshold for damage tolerance.  You decide if eating zucchini every day for a month is enough, and let the vines die when a squash borer moves in, and move on to eating tomatoes every day for a month.  You have more flexibility to operate according to your own wishes, and live by the season, not the whims of shareholders or the public used to eating strawberries in December.

The shift from families growing most of their own food, or at least a lot of their own produce to buying it all at the grocery happened in only the last 40-50 years or so.  A recent conversation with my grandma and mom remembered the large vegetable and fruit gardens the Inmans had to feed their large family.  By the time I was old enough to remember, the “Inman Orchard” was a bunch of wormy trees and some swing sets.  The orchard used to have pigs running around in it, and included row upon row of fresh produce.  Ideally, more people will begin growing more of their own food, which will reduce pollution, grocery bills, and dependence on oil.

That might not happen for a while.  I’m encouraged, though, by the interest in vegetable gardening this year-sparked by the recession, blogged about by my fellow gardeners, and encouraged with the first vegetable garden at the White House in years.  We’re getting closer to returning to our roots.

The Gardener’s A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food

Published by Storey Press, originally written by Tanya L.K. Denckla and published under the name “The Organic Gardener’s Home Reference.”

The title is a mouthfull.  Thankfully, the information in this big book is much easier to swallow than the big name.  One of the blurbs on the back of this attractive edition is from Ed Smith, author of The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible, a classic gardening reference.  He says “If it isn’t in this book, you don’t really need to know it.”  Pretty high praise coming from someone who has his own highly recommended vegetable gardening book.  I tend to agree with Mr. Smith.  From the stack of books I took out into the garden with me last weekend to plant, I referenced this one much more than any of the others.  The design of the book, almost as much as the information contained within it, makes it a must-have reference for vegetable gardeners.  The illustrations in the book are all beautiful woodcuts by Stephen Alcorn.   Cindy McFarland did the art direction.  Together with Tanya Denckla’s text, the elements come together as a reference that is as fun to read as it is useful.

Information Layout

The book is divided into six long chapters.  Chapter 1 gives an overview of organic gardening techinques.  Chapters two through four have details about vegetables, fruits and nuts, and herbs, presenting the information in standardized, chart formats.  This is great because you know exactly where to look for the information you need, after you have reviewed a few vegetables.  Finding the plant you are looking for is easy, becaus the names of the plants are in something like 72 point font along the edge of the pages.  You can flip through and easily find what you are looking for.  For each plant, the book includes the following information:

• Name (scientific and common)
• Family
• Summary of growing
• Optimum Growing Temperature
• Soil and Water needs
• Measurements for planting, mature plants and spacing
• Pests
• Diseases
• Allies
• Incompatibles
• Seed starting times
• Storage requirements
• Harvesting
• Descriptions of selected cultivars and varieties

Organic Pest and Disease Control

In addition to the encyclopedia of plant information, Chapter Five is a comprehensive guide to organically managing problems in the garden.  Becoming familiar with the information in this section will help you learn how to identify plant diseases (different types of spots, wilts, mosaics and other viruses), pests, and other problems.  The section includes information on identification, location of occurance, plant hosts and treatment options for almost every conceivable pest and disease.  You might think that the absence of color photographs of each issue would be a detriment to the effectiveness of this section, but it is not.  The author is quite descriptive, making up for the lack of color photographs.

Allies and Incompatibles

I particularly like Chapter Six, the section with information about allies and incompatibles.  I am trying to grow my garden so that plants help each other fight off pest and disease problems.  The charts listing allied plants and incompatible plants proved very useful as I was planting my early crops in anticipation of later crops.  (Growing nasturtiums where I plan to plant cucumbers (if they ever sprout!) and sweet peas where I will later plant tomatoes.)  Not only do the charts list compatible plants, additional information on how the plants help each other, which pests and diseases the ally plants deter, and the mechanism by which they do so is included.

I would recommend The Gardener’s A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food for anyone who is venturing into vegetable gardening for the first time, or the first time in a new area.  If you are making the transition to organic vegetable gardening, the information about organically controlling gardening problems is invaluable.

Botany for Gardeners

If you really care about your plants, read Brian Capon’s excellent book Botany for Gardeners. You may not find yourself referring to it every single day, but reading it, digesting it and incorporating your newfound knowledge into your gardening routine.  There are many reasons why I would recommend this book over others.

• Reading this book is sort of like reading a biography of plants.  It details “episodes” in the life of a plant and “portraits” of plant parts: flowering to fruiting, inside stems, inside roots, etc.
• It is written in English-not Botanical Latin/ You need a Master’s Degree to read this gibberish.
• The book has great pictures and diagrams.  If you don’t like to read, you could get an entire education re: botany for gardening from the pictures and diagrams.

What Botany can do for You!

I frequently tout that a little bit of knowledge about the way plants work goes a long way toward helping gardeners achieve gardening success.  I think I feel this way because I always gardened when I was little, but once I went to school and learned how systems in plants functioned, I was much better able to take care of my plants.  I remember being in soil science class and finally understanding what all of the patterns in the soil were that I saw from the air.  (You know-when you fly across the flat midwest in the winter, and the fields are plowed, but it looks like there are different colored rivers of soil running across the land?)  My eyes were opened after I took woody plant identification-I no longer saw a bunch of trees, I saw specific tree species.  Botany is like this for gardeners.  Once you know how plants grow, you will stop doing the following:

• Pruning branches, leaving more than 1/2 inch of wood above an active bud.  You will learn that the space between buds (on most plants) doesn’t do anything but hang out and be dead.  The buds sprout.  Better to prune close to the buds.
• Feeding at the time of planting/transplanting.  You should NEVER feed your plants immediately when you plant them, as the salts in fertilizers can cause the plants to dry out.  (If you are truly an organic gardener, you should be amending the soil with compost first-the only real “slow release” fertilizer.)
• Letting your annuals go to seed. In June.  You will learn that once an annual plant sets seed, its life cycle is done.  That means no more flowers.  You will know that you can prolong flowering by “deadheading” and pinching off the flowers after they have faded and before they can produce seeds.
• Mowing too close to the tree.  When you learn botany, you will learn that the most important part of a tree is right underneath the bark.  That section is called the cambium, and it is where the cells through which food and water flow are on the tree.  If you tear a strip of bark off the tree all the way around the trunk, you will completely disrupt transport of water and food, killing the tree.

Those are just a few nuggets of great information in Botany for Gardeners. Of course, it is up to you to use your new-found knowledge.  However, once you do, you will want to know more and more about your plants.