Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times

By Steve Solomon

Grow all your family’s food with just hand labor, four basic hand tools, and with little or no electricity or irrigation

In hard times, the family can be greatly helped by growing a highly productive food garden, requiring little cash outlay or watering. This book shows that any family with access to 3-5,000 sq. ft. of garden land can halve their food costs using a growing system requiring just the odd bucketful of household waste water, perhaps two hundred dollars’ worth of hand tools.

Gardening When It Counts helps readers rediscover traditional low-input gardening methods to produce healthy food. Currently popular intensive vegetable gardening methods are largely inappropriate to the new circumstances we find ourselves in. Crowded raised beds require high inputs of water, fertility and organic matter, and demand large amounts of human time and effort. Prior to the 1970s, North American home food growing used more land with less labor, with wider plant spacing, with less or no irrigation, and all done with sharp hand tools. But these sustainable systems have been largely forgotten.

Designed for readers with no experience and applicable to most areas in the English-speaking world except the tropics and hot deserts, Gardening When It Counts is inspiring increasing numbers of North Americans to achieve some measure of backyard food self-sufficiency.

Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Release date: Jan 30, 2006
• ISBN: 9781550923858

Reviews for Gardening When It Counts

[paperloverevolution · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An extremely useful book, full of information on how to get maximum nutrition at minimum cost from your vegetable garden. Detailed without being confusing or overly technical. He's got great advice on tools, water-saving techniques, and seed varieties.

[peacegarden_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

While I am not using all of his suggestions (particularly the spacing) I think it is a wonderful book. Use it (and COF) all the time.I believe his advice will be especially useful as external inputs become scarce or prohibitively expensive.His take on seeds and seed companies if spot on.

[amelia_smith-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I don't know why I'm suddenly so into reading gardening books, but this was one that I couldn't put down. The author is quite opinionated, which made for livelier reading than it might have been if he'd stuck to presenting his information in a more neutral tone.

I don't actually have a garden yet, but I plan to start one in the coming year, and I'll be interested to see how all this advice pans out. The final section, which ranks vegetables by difficulty-to-grow, might prove to be the most useful to me as I get the garden started.

[junipersun · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The first half of the book was so interesting I read it thru quickly, despite the many ways he challenges my gardening habits. He does support my lifelong approach of extensive gardening (tho I didn't know it's label before). I appreciate the concept of setting up a garden in a way that can be sustained no matter what happens to our energy supply, yet Solomon's approach is limited by his experiences in Oregon and Tasmania. For instance, he scoffs at mulching as being only for the handicapped and elderly but allows that it could be useful in areas with freezing winters and hot summers. That sounds like my home area in Wisconsin to me. Not a stickler for the standard organic approaches, Solomon challenges us to look logically at plant and soil processes rather than following Everybody Else. No references are given for his nutrient cycling explanations, so I can only take his word that plants will not grow well without a precise 12:1 carbon:nitrogen ratio. I can't help but think that nature is a bit more complex--and forgiving--than that. He makes no mention of the role of fungi in releasing nutrients. I know that our modern gardens are primarily driven by bacterial processes, but I suspect that fungi will need to be re-established for long-term sustainability. He gives a clue in his suspicion that Native Americans mulched between their corn hills with forest leaves--a source of fungal input. I will just have to wait for someone else to write the definitive Vegetable Gardening With Fungi book.The most informative chapters are those dealing with modern seed production and seed companies. Drawing heavily on his experience as former owner of Territorial Seed Company, he gives advice on purchasing reliable seeds. Apparently not all problems with growing vegetables can be blamed on home-grower error.The last chapter goes over 41 of the most common vegetables, describing the best method for growing for high nutritional value and taste. This includes methods for saving your own seeds which is somewhat inconsisttent with his previous assertion that plant genetics deteriorate unless a large enough planting is made.While his opening chapters state that irrigation will be too costly under energy and water shortages, he devotes a lengthy chapter to setting up an irrigation system. I suppose he wanted to be sure he passes on the best practices that he has gleaned over the years and didn't have any other book planned where it would make more sense to include.

[chrismarin-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As you can see by my library I have collected most of the important food growing books. Gardening When It Counts is in my opinion highly valuable as the author not only proposes new information but repudiates the old oft repeated information with technical and logical reasons why these ideas should be challenged.

[flouncyninja · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I suppose this book gave a little bit of helpful advice that I haven't read in other places. His technique involves working mostly organically, which I liked and he had some good ideas on how to maintain plants with a minimal amount of watering, which is useful in Texas where it doesn't rain that often. What didn't help was that this was for exponentially larger areas of growing than I will ever have access to.The author is an older man that has been growing plants and selling seed...moreI suppose this book gave a little bit of helpful advice that I haven't read in other places. His technique involves working mostly organically, which I liked and he had some good ideas on how to maintain plants with a minimal amount of watering, which is useful in Texas where it doesn't rain that often. What didn't help was that this was for exponentially larger areas of growing than I will ever have access to.The author is an older man that has been growing plants and selling seeds for a very long time. He knows what he's doing, but overall, I didn't find it to be overly helpful and think there are better books out there for newbie gardeners that live in the suburbs.I skipped a fair amount of sections - mostly about collecting your own seeds, veggies I have no intention of growing and how to make compost on such a large scale it would take up most of my back yard. Something tells me the HOA wouldn't approve.

[saponaria-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love this book. I have heard Steve Solomon called arrogant but I did not find him to be that way. He is however a glass is half empty kind of guy. I appreciate it. So many gardening books are so unrealistic leading people to believe they can grow anything if they only do a simply X.Y and Z. It rarely works out that way. This is the best gardening book I have read in a while and I have read a lot. I appreciate him breaking down vegetables into how demanding they are to grow. I love his recipe for COF or complete organic fertilizer. I can't wait to put more of his suggestions into practice. I definitely took his advice as a former owner of a seed company into practice with my most recent seed company choices. I will be pulling this book out over and over again. I can't recommend it enough. I will also not be doing any more French intensive gardening. He just confirmed what I had experienced over the years. I hate to say I just needed someone to point out that just because "everyone" says this is what is best doesn't mean it's so!

[jaygheiser · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I haven't had a chance to try out what he suggests, but he makes some compelling arguments that my Square Foot Garden was counterproductive.

[wmt477 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The best book for vegetable gardening since Coleman's New Organic Gardening.