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

Regular price €38.99
A01=Will Bonsall
adaptation
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
agriculture
Author_Will Bonsall
automatic-update
best guide resilience
biochar
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=VSZ
Category=WMQ
climate change
compost
compost urine
COP=United States
cover crop
crop integration
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
energy cycling
eq_home-garden
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
eq_self-help
fermentation
food prices
food security
food shortage
food storage
fruit
garden
gardening
grain shortage
gravity feed
grow food
grow your own
herbal
home farm
homestead
humanure
inflation
land
Language_English
leach field
nutrient-dense food
nuts
off grid
off-grid living
organic
PA=Available
passive water supply
pasture reclamation
perennial crops
permaculture
plant medicine
prepper
prepper guide
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
resilient gardening
scything
season extension
self-reliant
skills for emergencies
small scale
softlaunch
soil fertility
solar energy
survival
survivalist
tall grass grazing
water security
winter cover

Product details

  • ISBN 9781603584425
  • Weight: 1089g
  • Dimensions: 204 x 254mm
  • Publication Date: 23 Jun 2015
  • Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Co
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

Our Delivery Time Frames Explained
2-4 Working Days: Available in-stock

10-20 Working Days
: On Backorder

Will Deliver When Available
: On Pre-Order or Reprinting

We ship your order once all items have arrived at our warehouse and are processed. Need those 2-4 day shipping items sooner? Just place a separate order for them!

"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."

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.