Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture

The Library journal review does a huge disservice to this book.

Imagine a beautiful, highly productive, virtually weed-free,

drought-resistant, inexpensive, low-maintenance and ecologically sound

garden bed in your yard. It sounds impossible, but it is very simple

and only requires a few hours to create this fall, no digging required.

You can put to use the bounty of leaves and/or pine needles that are

provided for free to almost every suburbanite in the fall. This

is the ideal time, as the bed is better if it can break down over the

winter.

I have been gardening for about 25 years, and wish had I had heard of

this method sooner. It is perfect, especially for those who are not

physically able to dig, till or do a lot of weeding or simply have very

little time for gardening.

It involves piling up and wetting down 8 -12 inches of layers of

organic matter (we used leaves and some manure) on top of a thin layer

of newspapers or cardboard, with a small amount of amendments such as

greensand, lime and rock phosphate and manure underneath the paper. On

the top is a 1-2 inch layer of mulch (we used white pine needles), to

keep in moisture and suppress weeds. Come spring, you simply push aside

the top mulch and plant seedlings.

This 'sheet mulching' method came from this wonderful book by Toby

Hemenway. We have several sheet mulch beds this

year, and they are outrageously productive. For example, one 4' x 9'

bed in a very sunny spot, contains 6 large tomato plants, 3 sweet

pepper plants, 3 cucumber vines on a trellis, a short row of

sunflowers, one summer squash plant, and 7 winter squash plants. I

find this amazing considering that the ground underneath is very poor,

sandy and barely supported grass.


With apologies to Mae West, I have learned a big lesson, it's not the soil

in your life, it's the life in your soil!

I bought this book in January and have many times over saved the price in
time, mulch and bought amendments using ONLY the sheet mulch idea.

An excellent book and resource. At the time I purchased this book, I also purchased Bill Mollison's seminal work on permaculture. I intended to read Mollison's book first and Gaia's Garden second. After reading the first few pages of Mollison's book, I set it aside to "look through" Gaia's Garden just to familiarize myself with its contents. I discovered that I could not put it down because it is so well written and informative. I recommend this book to all persons interested in the subject of permaculture.

This was recommended by someone when I started asking questions about permaculture. I am glad he did! It is a great introduction without being too simplistic. It is showing me how to start small and gradually increase the use of permaculture.

I have shown it to friends who are all waiting to borrow it from me!

This book is excellent for establishing new concepts of applying time tested old technology. I use these principles everyday and I look forward to the days when we need to rely on our local resources and skills in order to make a living. This book teaches you how to make a start with permaculture.

I have totally enjoyed this book. The principles are a little murky because apparently this is a pretty new field and not very well developed for the eastern seabord which I live but it does provide enough guidance to begin setting up your own permaculture areas and start developing areas to be more ecologically sound food producing and living environments. I would HIGHLY recommend it as a first book on permaculture and the resources section alone has been a joy.