Two good books which approach organic gardening from different directions came my way recently. They are far from new but they are still in print so they deserve a mention.
Jackie French’s The Wilderness Garden (Aird Books, 1992/2007) was welcomed enthusiastically after a quick look. The Introduction begins, Beware of the gardens of the righteous! Or, ‘How never to weed, feed or dig your garden again.’ How can anything bad follow that?
Tim Marshall’s Bug: the Ultimate Gardener’s Guide to Organic Pest Control (ABC Books, 2010) impressed me immediately, too, because his introduction to our small wildlife was so lucid and positive.
Bug: the Ultimate Gardener’s Guide to Organic Pest Control
Tim Marshall has been a leader in Australia’s organic gardening movement for decades and has written a book for any organic (or want-to-be-organic) gardeners needing to know more about the bugs in their garden.
A general chapter about organic principles leads naturally into one about organic bug control (biological control, physical control and organic sprays). His emphasis is always on minimising the need for control treatments by making the whole garden as healthy as possible.
Then the core of the book: ‘Bad Bugs’ and ‘Good Bugs’ get a whole chapter each, with guidance on identification and how to harm the former and help the latter. The book concludes with a chart summarising those action plans, and a collection of recipes for pest treatments.
Bug is a nearly perfect book of its kind and is highly recommended. (Why ‘nearly’? Just because it lacks a little eye appeal and doesn’t cover tropical gardens as well as it might.)
The Wilderness Garden – Beyond Organic Gardening
Jackie French’s online bio suggests she likes to keep herself happily occupied. It begins, “Jackie French AM is an Australian author, historian, ecologist and honourary wombat. … Instead of hobbies she has written over 200 books; built a house and power system; planted thousands of trees; harvests about 800 of them; lunches with friends; reads to her grandkids; tries to find her glasses; eats dark chocolates, what ever fruit is in season and the odd feral species. (Some are very odd).” And some of us thought she only wrote children’s books!
Her gardening books are listed under ‘Sustainability and Ecology‘ on her website. The Wilderness Garden – Beyond Organic Gardening, Revised 2nd Edition (2007), appears there alongside related titles from the same period covering organic pest control, weed control, self-sufficiency, companion planting and plant propagation. Our (recycled! free!) copy shown above is the first edition (1992).
It’s full of good organic gardening advice, and goes ‘beyond’ by encouraging its readers to trust and assist natural processes a little more. Adapting the garden to its location, rather than fighting nature, is the first step. Using desirable plants to crowd out weeds, just as we should use good bugs to control bad bugs, is another. Her Q&A page ends:
How do I kill…
Don’t. Spend your energy growing things, not killing things. That’s the secret of wilderness gardening.
It’s the key message of her whole book, too.
Her detailed advice, like Marshall’s, is biased towards temperate climates so tropical gardeners may like to supplement it with one or more of the books I surveyed here ten years ago, but The Wilderness Garden is a pleasure to read.
Most people with any interest in organic gardening are at least vaguely aware that glyphosate, the active ingredient of Roundup, is a bad thing. These two information pages from Drugwatch expand on that idea. They need to be read with their American origin in mind but the information is all correct. The first explains just why Roundup is regarded with such suspicion and the second offers gardeners some less toxic, more organic, alternative ways of controlling weeds.
http://www.drugwatch.com/roundup/glyphosate/
http://www.drugwatch.com/roundup/alternatives/