Recommended Reading List
Sherrie Ottinger
“The Tennessee Dirt Girl”
My assignment was to make a list of the 25 gardening books I feel are essential reading for agriculture. There are 26 books listed. As you know, my commitment is to the health and security of our air, soil, and water, above all other elements. If we do not know/learn how to protect and heal them, we die. It’s that simple. In my opinion, these books contain all the possibilities to help new ag folks, and seasoned ones, to do these very things.
I looked each one up to make sure they are all still available. Each one comes from my experience in garden reading/learning, and recommendations from valued mentors. All of these books are in my home library. I have several wonderful books that I would’ve liked to have added but they’re no longer available.
I don’t recommend anything based on the “top ten” kinds of lists, because they may not be good information. If I haven’t read it, I won’t advise anyone else to.
A Way to Garden
-Margaret Roach
For Margaret Roach, gardening is more than a hobby, it’s a calling. Her unique approach, which she calls “horticultural how-to and woo-woo,” is a blend of vital information you need to memorize and intuitive steps you must simply feel and surrender to. In A Way to Garden, Roach imparts decades of garden wisdom on seasonal gardening, ornamental plants, vegetable gardening, design, gardening for wildlife, organic practices, and much more. She also challenges gardeners to think beyond their garden borders and to consider the ways gardening can enrich the world. Brimming with beautiful photographs of Roach’s own garden, A Way to Garden is practical, inspiring, and a must-have for every passionate gardener.
NYT 1,000 Gardening Questions and Answers
-Leslie Land
Authoritative, accessible, and engaging, here is a new reference from The New York Times, a comprehensive, nearly 700-page bible of all the garden news that's fit to print. Based on "Gardeners Q&A." the enormously popular syndicated column, 1000 Gardening Questions and Answers is like a passionate conversation between gardeners and gardening experts. Every week readers from around the country send in their most vexing problems--how to divide perennials, prune raspberry canes, grow basil that really tastes like basil, get rid of earwigs, find long-lost varieties of flowers, keep honeysuckle under control--and every week, the authorities at the Times write a column full of answers.
Carefully selected, updated, and expanded by Leslie Land, one of the column's two authors, here are 1,000 Q&As that add up to an informal encyclopedia of gardening knowledge. The book covers flowers, trees, shrubs, the lawn, vegetables, herbs, fruit, indoor plants, soil, pests, and troublemakers. It addresses problems and provides answers to difficulties in every North American zone. Hundreds of line drawings illustrate the book, providing botanical identification and demonstrating how-to gardening techniques. In addition, sidebars throughout supply supplemental information--"Dos and Don'ts of Deadheading," "Annuals that Beat the Heat," "To Prune or Not to Prune: The Clematis Question," "Air Layering," "Windowsill Bonsai"--plus quirky facts, trivia, lore, and myth. It's big, it's got heft, it's filled to the brim with information. And it's so lively, it reads like a novel--and belongs on every gardener's potting bench and bedside table.
The Handy Garden Answer Book
Answers questions related to such topics as plants and soil science; seeding, propagation, and planting; care and feeding; garden design; special gardens; perennials; vegetables and fruits; and lawns, groundcovers, and ornamental grasses.
-Karen Troshynski-Thomas
The Green Barbarians
Sandbeck preaches a return to a more primitive way of life—a life with more joy and fewer household products. Green Barbarians demonstrates that by mustering a bit of courage and relying less on many modern conveniences, we can live happier, safer, more ecologically and economically responsible lives.
-Ellen Sandbeck
Slug Bread and Beheaded Thistles
Many homemakers and gardeners take the easy way out when it comes to exiling odors and banishing bugs--they use toxic chemicals that may be harmful to their families and the earth. Ellen Sandbeck has discovered that the all-natural alternatives are just as easy and effective to use, and that they are wickedly fun. Sandbeck's way of banishing thistles from her backyard kingdom is a case in point: she chops off their heads and lets them bleed to death. Slug Bread & Beheaded Thistles reveals all of her best tricks. From bedroom to bathroom, garden to lawn, your home will be clean and green and pest-free.
-Ellen Sandbeck
Eat More Dirt
-Ellen Sandbeck
Growing and tending an earth-friendly garden, in ways you haven’t imagined! From peat moss to irksome pests and predators, Sandbeck explores the lively world of compost heaps (which can be used to naturally “vaccinate” your garden against disease), growing good soil, choosing plants well-adapted to your climate, weed warfare, planting protocols, and eco-friendly ways to quench your garden’s thirst. Whether you tend an acre or just a window box, Eat More Dirt is an essential guide to keeping your garden thriving, the natural way.
Noah’s Garden
-Sara Stein
Published to rave reviews in 1993, Noah's Garden shows us how our landscape style of neat yards and gardens has devastated suburban ecology, wiping out entire communities of plants and animals by stripping bare their habitats and destroying their food supplies. When Stein realized what her intensive efforts at making a traditional garden had done, she set out to "ungarden." Her book interweaves an account of her efforts with an explanation of the ecology of gardens. Noah's Garden has become the bible of the new environmental gardening movement, and the author is one of its most popular spokespersons.
Weeds and What They Tell Us
-Ehrenfried Pfeiffer
This wonderful little book covers everything you need to know about the types of plants known as weeds. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer discusses the different varieties of weeds, how they grow and what they can tell us about soil health. The process of combatting weeds is discussed in principle as well as in practice, so that it can be applied to any situation. First written in the 1950s, this is still one of the best overviews of the subject available.
Weeds, Guardians of the Soil
SO FAR as we are able to determine this is the first book to be written in praise of weeds. According to Joseph Cocannouer, weeds -- the common ragweeds, pigweeds, pusleys and nettles, to mention four -- perform the following valuable services among others:
They bring minerals, especially those which have been depleted, up from the subsoil to the topsoil and make them available to crops. This is particularly important with regard to trace elements.
When used in crop rotation they break up hardpans and allow subsequent crop roots to feed deeply.
They fiberize and condition the soil and provide a good environment for the minute but important animal and plant life that make any soil productive.
They are good indicators of soil condition, both as to variety of weed present and to condition of the individual plant. Certain weeds appear when certain deficiencies occur.
Weeds are deep divers and feeders and through soil capillarity they enable the less hardy, surface feeding crops to withstand drought better than the crop alone could.
As companion crops, they enable our domesticated plants to get their roots to otherwise unavailable food.
Weeds store up minerals and nutrients that would be washed, blown or leached away from bare ground and keep them readily available.
Weeds make good eating -- for man as well as for livestock. The publisher can vouch for the superiority of lamb's quarter -- a favorite of the author -- over any other domestic form of spinach or cooked greens.
No, Professor Cocannouer does not believe that weeds should be allowed to go rampant and take over our farms and gardens. The function of this book, a pioneering work, is to demonstrate how the controlled use of weeds can be sound ecology, good conservation and a boon to the average farmer or gardener.
-Joseph Cocannouer
You Can Farm
-Joel Salatin
(Several excellent books by this author)
Have you ever desired, deep within your soul, to make a comfortable full-time living from a farming enterprise? Too often people dare not even vocalize this desire because it seems absurd. It's like thinking the unthinkable. After all, the farm population is dwindling. It takes too much capital to start. The pay is too low. The working conditions are dusty, smelly and noisy: not the place to raise a family. This is all true, and more, for most farmers. But for farm entrepreneurs, the opportunities for a farm family business have never been greater. The aging farm population is creating cavernous niches begging to be filled by creative visionaries who will go in dynamic new directions. As the industrial agriculture complex crumbles and our culture clambers for clean food, the countryside beckons anew with profitable farming opportunities.
While this book can be helpful to all farmers, it targets the wannabes, the folks who actually entertain notions of living, loving and learning on a piece of land. Anyone willing to dance with such a dream should be able to assess its assets and liabilities; its fantasies and realities. "Is it really possible for me?" is the burning question this book addresses.
Dirt to Soil
-Gabe Brown
Gabe Brown didn’t set out to change the world when he first started working alongside his father-in-law on the family farm in North Dakota. But as a series of weather-related crop disasters put Brown and his wife, Shelly, in desperate financial straits, they started making bold changes to their farm. Brown―in an effort to simply survive―began experimenting with new practices he’d learned about from reading and talking with innovative researchers and ranchers. As he and his family struggled to keep the farm viable, they found themselves on an amazing journey into a new type of farming: regenerative agriculture.
Brown dropped the use of most of the herbicides, insecticides, and synthetic fertilizers that are a standard part of conventional agriculture. He switched to no-till planting, started planting diverse cover crops mixes, and changed his grazing practices. In so doing Brown transformed a degraded farm ecosystem into one full of life―starting with the soil and working his way up, one plant and one animal at a time.
In Dirt to Soil Gabe Brown tells the story of that amazing journey and offers a wealth of innovative solutions to restoring the soil by laying out and explaining his "five principles of soil health," which are:
Limited Disturbance
Armor
Diversity
Living Roots
Integrated Animals
The Brown’s Ranch model, developed over twenty years of experimentation and refinement, focuses on regenerating resources by continuously enhancing the living biology in the soil. Using regenerative agricultural principles, Brown’s Ranch has grown several inches of new topsoil in only twenty years! The 5,000-acre ranch profitably produces a wide variety of cash crops and cover crops as well as grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured laying hens, broilers, and pastured pork, all marketed directly to consumers.
The key is how we think, Brown says. In the industrial agricultural model, all thoughts are focused on killing things. But that mindset was also killing diversity, soil, and profit, Brown realized. Now he channels his creative thinking toward how he can get more life on the land―more plants, animals, and beneficial insects. “The greatest roadblock to solving a problem,” Brown says, “is the human mind.”
Tomatoland
-Barry Estabrook
This book is now in its third edition.
Three-time James Beard Award-winner Barry Estabrook’s completely revised third edition of his hard-hitting 2011 exposé, Tomatoland, includes a new foreword by Eric Schlosser and four new chapters with startling updates.
Four entirely new chapters take up where the current edition leaves off to tell the story behind what president Bill Clinton calls “the most astonishing thing politically in the world we’re living in today.” Estabrook reveals how a rag-tag group of migrant tomato pickers in Florida convinced the world’s largest restaurant chains and food retailers to join forces to create a model for labor justice, and then took the necessary steps to make sure that the model really works, not only in Florida, but around the world.
The book includes a new foreword by journalist and author Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation).
Holy Shit
-Gene Logsdon
In his insightful book, Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind, contrary farmer Gene Logsdon provides the inside story of manure ― our greatest, yet most misunderstood, natural resource.
He begins by lamenting a modern society that not only throws away both animal and human manure, worth billions of dollars in fertilizer value, but that spends a staggering amount of money to do so. This wastefulness makes even less sense as the supply of mined or chemically synthesized fertilizers dwindles and their cost skyrockets. In fact, he argues, if we do not learn how to turn our manures into fertilizer to keep food production in line with the increasing population, our civilization, like so many that went before it, will inevitably decline.
With his trademark humor, years of experience writing about both farming and waste management, and uncanny eye for the small but important details, Logsdon artfully describes how to manage farm manure, pet manure and human manure to make fertilizer and humus. He covers the field, so to speak, discussing topics like:
How to select the right pitchfork for the job and use it correctly
How to operate a small manure spreader
How to build a barn manure pack with farm animal manure
How to compost cat and dog waste
How to recycle toilet water for irrigation purposes, and
How to get rid ourselves of our irrational paranoia about feces and urine.
Gene Logsdon does not mince words. This fresh, fascinating and entertaining look at an earthy, but absolutely crucial subject, is a small gem destined to become a classic of our agricultural literature.
Let It Rot! The Gardener’s Guide to Composting
-Stu Campbell
In 1975, Let it Rot! helped start the composting movement and taught gardeners everywhere how to recycle waste to create soil-nourishing compost. Contains advice for starting and maintaining a composting system, building bins, and using compost. Third Edition. 318,000 copies in print.
Horticulture Gardener’s Desk Reference
-Ann Halpin
Instead of hunting through scores of garden books for bits of knowledge, consult the Horticulture Gardener's Desk Reference, an accessible one-stop reference designed to answer the gardener's every question. In addition, the appendices are an exhaustive resource of plant societies, public gardens, and mail-order seed and nursery companies all over the world.
With editorial oversight from Horticulture magazine, one of America's oldest experts in gardening, authoritative, up-to-date advice is geared for gardeners at all levels. An explanation of Latin botanical nomenclature is coupled with advanced gardening techniques, such as pruning for a triple cordon espalier.
Basic horticulture is not overlooked, with chapters devoted to particular groups of plants or types of gardens. You can find recommendations for the best trees and shrubs in a mixed border, ornamental grasses that naturalize easily, or the easiest hot peppers to grow in a vegetable garden.
Scattered throughout are how-to line drawings that illustrate everything from dividing perennials and correctly pruning hedges to removing a large limb from an established tree. Rounding out this reference are lists and sidebars devoted to miscellaneous topics, such as ancient Celtic seasons, the Chinese agricultural calendar, top rose breeders, and herbs that make a nice substitute for bubble bath. Whether the information you seek is basic or obscure, you'll find it in the Horticulture Gardener's Desk Reference.
Living the Country Lifestyle For Dummies
-Various Contributors
Living the Country Lifestyle All-in-One for Dummies features six books in one, including:
Country Cooking (cast-iron cooking, canning, pickling, and outdoor cooking, among other topics)
Traditional Crafts (sheering animals and producing wool, knitting, hand sewing, patchwork and quilting, candle making)
Kitchen Gardening (growing and caring for vegetables, herbs, and fruit)
Outdoor Skills (camp skills, fishing, navigation, outdoor family fun)
Raising Farm Animals (buying, housing, and raising animals, beekeeping)
Natural Health (herbal remedies, an encyclopedia of herbs, and healing
Good Soil
-T. Raman/E.M. Rundquist/J. Lagache
Maximize your garden, whatever you grow in it, with some Swedish expertise.
Plants need nutrients to grow, flower and bear fruit, nutrients that can be found in offal, the sea, fire, rocks, rubbish and, of course, dung heaps. Tina Råman digs into every aspect of nurturing your soil, from chemistry and biology to history and philosophy, giving you practical advice, generous tips and above all masses of inspiration. She lifts the lid on old and reliable fertilization methods and opens the doors to new resource-efficient and environmentally-smart cultivation techniques.
Good Soil doesn’t look like a typical gardening book but it’s a book that everyone interested in gardening needs.
Traditional Garden Wisdom
-C. Ryrie/A. Halpin
Reader's Digest Books, NY. Handsome oversize, tall hardcover volume, crammed with useful information, 464 pages. Brilliant vintage drawings, photos. Great pictorial artwork throughout, with some color photos. Includes 1-page spreads on everything from Mountain Cranberry, Mouse-Ear, Sourtop Blueberry, Wild Yam, Milk Thistle, and Black Birch. Hundreds of entries. Includes sections on poisonous plants, exotic plants, growing herbs, cooking with herbs, and herb crafts. Very useful, very well done.
The One Straw Revolution
-Masanobou Fukuoka
Call it “Zen and the Art of Farming” or a “Little Green Book,” Masanobu Fukuoka’s manifesto about farming, eating, and the limits of human knowledge presents a radical challenge to the global systems we rely on for our food. At the same time, it is a spiritual memoir of a man whose innovative system of cultivating the earth reflects a deep faith in the wholeness and balance of the natural world. As Wendell Berry writes in his preface, the book “is valuable to us because it is at once practical and philosophical. It is an inspiring, necessary book about agriculture because it is not just about agriculture.”
The Natural Way of Farming
Examines the state of modern agriculture and describes organic no-tillage agricultural techniques based on the inter-relatedness of all nature.
-Masanobou Fukuoka
The Road Back to Nature
-Masanobou Fukuoka
Discusses global ecology, destructive farming practices, desertification, deforestation, and the repair of ecological damage
Sowing Seeds in the Desert
-Masanobou Fukuoka
The earth is in great peril, due to the corporatization of agriculture, the rising climate crisis, and the ever-increasing levels of global poverty, starvation, and desertification on a massive scale. This present condition of global trauma is not "natural," but a result of humanity's destructive actions. And, according to Masanobu Fukuoka, it is reversible. We need to change not only our methods of earth stewardship, but also the very way we think about the relationship between human beings and nature.
Fukuoka grew up on a farm on the island of Shikoku in Japan. As a young man he worked as a customs inspector for plants going into and out of the country. This was in the 1930s when science seemed poised to create a new world of abundance and leisure, when people fully believed they could improve upon nature by applying scientific methods and thereby reap untold rewards. While working there, Fukuoka had an insight that changed his life forever. He returned to his home village and applied this insight to developing a revolutionary new way of farming that he believed would be of great benefit to society. This method, which he called "natural farming," involved working with, not in opposition to, nature.
Fukuoka's inspiring and internationally best-selling book, The One-Straw Revolution was first published in English in 1978. In this book, Fukuoka described his philosophy of natural farming and why he came to farm the way he did. One-Straw was a huge success in the West, and spoke directly to the growing movement of organic farmers and activists seeking a new way of life. For years after its publication, Fukuoka traveled around the world spreading his teachings and developing a devoted following of farmers seeking to get closer to the truth of nature.
Sowing Seeds in the Desert, a summation of those years of travel and research, is Fukuoka's last major work-and perhaps his most important. Fukuoka spent years working with people and organizations in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United States, to prove that you could, indeed, grow food and regenerate forests with very little irrigation in the most desolate of places. Only by greening the desert, he said, would the world ever achieve true food security.
This revolutionary book presents Fukuoka's plan to rehabilitate the deserts of the world using natural farming, including practical solutions for feeding a growing human population, rehabilitating damaged landscapes, reversing the spread of desertification, and providing a deep understanding of the relationship between human beings and nature. Fukuoka's message comes right at the time when people around the world seem to have lost their frame of reference, and offers us a way forward.
Seed Money
-Bartow J. Elmore
Winner of the 2022 IACP Award for Food Issues and Matters
Finalist for the 2022 George Perkins Marsh Prize
Finalist for the 2022 Hagley Prize in Business History
An authoritative and eye-opening history that examines how Monsanto came to have outsized influence over our food system.
Monsanto, a St. Louis chemical firm that became the world’s largest maker of genetically engineered seeds, merged with German pharma-biotech giant Bayer in 2018―but its Roundup Ready® seeds, introduced twenty-five years ago, are still reshaping the farms that feed us.
When researchers found trace amounts of the firm’s blockbuster herbicide in breakfast cereal bowls, Monsanto faced public outcry. Award-winning historian Bartow J. Elmore shows how the Roundup story is just one of the troubling threads of Monsanto’s past, many told here and woven together for the first time.
A company employee sitting on potentially explosive information who weighs risking everything to tell his story. A town whose residents are urged to avoid their basements because Monsanto’s radioactive waste laces their homes’ foundations. Factory workers who peel off layers of their skin before accepting cash bonuses to continue dirty jobs. An executive wrestling with the ethics of selling a profitable product he knew was toxic.
Incorporating global fieldwork, interviews with company employees, and untapped corporate and government records, Elmore traces Monsanto’s astounding evolution from a scrappy chemical startup to a global agribusiness powerhouse. Monsanto used seed money derived from toxic products―including PCBs and Agent Orange―to build an agricultural empire, promising endless bounty through its genetically engineered technology.
Skyrocketing sales of Monsanto’s new Roundup Ready system stunned even those in the seed trade, who marveled at the influx of cash and lavish incentives into their sleepy sector. But as new data emerges about the Roundup system, and as Bayer faces a tide of lawsuits over Monsanto products past and present, Elmore’s urgent history shows how our food future is still very much tethered to the company’s chemical past.
A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century
-Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
This recommendation came from Drew Wilson.
A bold, provocative history of our species finds the roots of civilization's success and failure in our evolutionary biology.
We are living through the most prosperous age in all of human history, yet people are more listless, divided and miserable than ever. Wealth and comfort are unparalleled, and yet our political landscape grows ever more toxic, and rates of suicide, loneliness, and chronic illness continue to skyrocket. How do we explain the gap between these two truths? What's more, what can we do to close it?
For evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, the cause of our woes is clear: the modern world is out of sync with our ancient brains and bodies. We evolved to live in clans, but today most people don't even know their neighbors' names. Survival in our earliest societies depended on leveraging the advantages of our sex differences, but today even the concept of biological sex is increasingly dismissed as offensive. The cognitive dissonance spawned by trying to live in a society we're not built for is killing us.
In this book, Heying and Weinstein cut through the politically fraught discourse surrounding issues like sex, gender, diet, parenting, sleep, education, and more to outline a science-based worldview that will empower you to live a better, wiser life. They distill more than 20 years of research and first-hand accounts from the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth into straightforward principles and guidance for confronting our culture of hyper-novelty.
Last Child in the Woods
-Richard Louv
This recommendation came from Sarah Vogt.
The book that Launched an International Movement
“An absolute must-read for parents.” —The Boston Globe
“It rivals Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.” —The Cincinnati Enquirer
“I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are,” reports a fourth grader. But it’s not only computers, television, and video games that are keeping kids inside. It’s also their parents’ fears of traffic, strangers, Lyme disease, and West Nile virus; their schools’ emphasis on more and more homework; their structured schedules; and their lack of access to natural areas. Local governments, neighborhood associations, and even organizations devoted to the outdoors are placing legal and regulatory constraints on many wild spaces, sometimes making natural play a crime.
As children’s connections to nature diminish and the social, psychological, and spiritual implications become apparent, new research shows that nature can offer powerful therapy for such maladies as depression, obesity, and attention deficit disorder. Environment-based education dramatically improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages and develops skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that childhood experiences in nature stimulate creativity.
In Last Child in the Woods, Louv talks with parents, children, teachers, scientists, religious leaders, child-development researchers, and environmentalists who recognize the threat and offer solutions. Louv shows us an alternative future, one in which parents help their kids experience the natural world more deeply—and find the joy of family connectedness in the process.