Browsing new books is always a pleasure and at this time of year, those that impress get added to my bookshelves and/or are put on the mental list of "buy this for so-and-so for Christmas".
The latest offerings include two titles that reflect the trend towards growing more of one’s own food, one on dry-climate options, while the fourth is a collection of a dozen "secret" gardens around New Zealand.
Journey to self-sufficiency
Although Rebecca Stewart and her husband, David, made dramatic changes to their lives, she says it "all took time" and it is still happening, "because we never stop learning".
Subtitled A Journey to Self-sufficiency, the book is not just about a family’s return to the land and how well they have succeeded in their quest, but it is also a guide to helping others.
To prevent overload, she recommends starting with one thing "and work on that until it becomes habit".
Stewart’s vegetable garden is based on no-dig principles, with root crops such as yams, Jerusalem artichokes, kūmara and Māori potatoes left to do their own thing.
Eating seasonally is important, too, and as she points out, "the ease with which we can source so many foods these days has removed this habit from many people’s lives".
Life on Fodder Farm has lots to recommend it, from tips to recipes of all kinds and the photos by Summer Stewart are excellent.
Recommended.
Growing own food
Like Rebecca Stewart, Rotorua gardener Leah Evans wants us to get back to growing more of our own food, but unlike the former, her scale is much smaller.
The subtitle, Grow Your Own Kai with Mrs Evans, says it all.
Whether you are growing in a garden bed, raised bed or container, Evans gives helpful advice on what to do, starting with the importance of good soil and how to achieve it.
With a useful diagram to illustrate her point, she emphasises the importance of crop rotation, saying: "The important thing is to keep things moving around: change the crop family in each bed each season, and create bio-diverse spaces."
The second part of the book is about individual vegetables. Called "Mrs Evans’ kitchen garden staples", the emphasis is on familiar vegetables with common-sense advice on how to grow them. Each vegetable then has down-to-earth recipes that don’t require lots of expensive extras to make them taste good.
Well-illustrated, Hands in the Dirt would make a great gift for a novice gardener.
Highly recommended.
Dry gardening
There's no doubt American writer Noelle Johnson knows about gardening in a dry climate. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona, which in July had a 31-day heatwave, with minimum daily temperatures of 43.3°C, and no rain.
Choosing the right plants is "the most critical element to an attractive and resilient landscape", Johnson says, adding that countless people struggle to grow plants unsuited to their environment.
That’s true of all climates and one of her tips is if you move to a different climate, don’t try to take plants from your old garden to the new.
Johnson advocates using plants native to your area and although they will needed watering when first planted, once established they will withstand drought and insect pests.
Her book is chock full of great garden tips and ideas, many of which can be applied to all gardens, not just dry ones.
Recommended.
Secret gardens
I've never before come across a book where the owners of featured gardens are identified only by their Christian names, but that’s the setup in Secret Gardens of Aotearoa.
A couple of years ago, Mahoney created a network of gardens where owners host visits, so presumably the coyness over names is related to that. However, if you really want to know the surnames, they are in the acknowledgments on page 315.
The 12 featured gardens are scattered across the country, with two in the Otago region — one in suburban Dunedin and a Mt Maude property. There is nothing from Southland or the West Coast.
The authors were also the photographers along with Josephine Meachen, and it must have been frustrating to see lovely shots dumbed down as a result of being printed on paper lacking the gloss to do them justice.
Other irritants are the lack of an index, failure to identify many of the photographed plants and the messy layout of the book.
I’ll pass on this one.
