Lots of information to maximize yield. Appears to be for really big gardens.

Wow! I am buying this book. This exactly what I wanted to do with my yard but wasn't sure how to implement. It covers bed making (I adapted it), soil prep, composting, seed starting and space usage. I'm buying this one!

Really good advice in places but restrictive in other places.. as if they haven't taken any other well known market garden growing systems into account. Will reference the master charts at a later date but will definitely not be double digging! No-dig only systems for me

This was a fantastic gardening book, It first gardening book that I picked up and read from cover to cover, I learned so much and have started putting the practises to work and getting wonderful results. Highly recommend to any gardener new or experienced.

Some great information on utilization of land. A bit doomsday in perspective, though helpful information for good stewardship. Overall, I thought it packed with useful charts and tidbits.

I think I know less about gardening after finishing this book than before I started.

There are about three useful chapters in this book: one about compost, one about preparing raised beds, and one about companion planting (and that one is a little weak). The rest of this book is a repetitive advertisement for the GROW BIOINTENSIVE method, which we all need to adopt because the world will be unable to feed itself using traditional methods by 2020. (Naturally, I'm frantic. It's 2019 and I don't even have 4000 square feet per family member, let alone know how to garden it. However, this book was no help, and I'll have to mail away for more GROW BIODIVERSE materials to fully prepare for the coming vegapocolypse.)

I was really hoping to learn more about how to grow stuff together in my tiny 120 square ft garden, but I'll have to find another book to help me with that. According to this book I need to grow wheat and alfalfa for no reason other than to create compost to grow wheat and alfalfa in.

it was also riddled with strange errors. For example, he provides a sample template of a family garden that grows over the course of 5 years, and for four of those years, he grows tomatoes in the exact same spot. Is that not poor crop rotation? Now I'm confused. Was that an error, or can one grow tomatoes in the same spot for 4 years without disease buildup?

Some other fantastic stuff in this book: planting by the phases of the moon. Because the gravity makes roots pop out. How to mash up and crystallize plants to see if they will grow well together. Seriously: I question the entire companion planting science now that I've read this.

a good chunk of this book is dedicated to "master charts" which describe how many calories you can get per square foot if you plant these recommended vegetables. Amazing if you're preparing for the apocalypse, pretty useless for those of us who measure our produce by item count and plant by food ingredient, not caloric density.

If you want to learn how to grow stuff in a small amount of space using an intensive method, I recommend literally any other offering on the market.

I like this book since it helped me to understand the concept of planting by the phases of the moon. There are other great things about it too, but it's not the kind of book I read front to back. It's the kind of book that I think does best when you skip around and read what catches your interest in each particular sitting.

Super informative with great resources. Included PDF files of all the charts!

This was cool. I learned a lot about preparing the soil, transplanting, etc. but I am not advanced enough to take its advice for making a totally sustainable homestead. Neat though and great food for thought. Maybe next year!

This book was mostly an advertisement for the GROW BIOINTENSIVE method and the Ecology Action group, paired with fear mongering about the sustainability of current farming methods based on some questionable research. It did have a number of tips about how to grow your own food with limited land resources, and even how it is theoretically possible to make money selling the excess crop. It could be a good reference book for someone who wants to be very meticulous about growing vegetables without fertilizer or pesticides, even organic ones.

The most interesting part for me was the section on planting by the moon's phases. My great-grandfather (a hobby farmer) swore by this method, so it was interesting to see some reasoning behind its use.

Originally published in 1974 , this is an organic gardening classic. It has been an inspiration to many other gardeners and farmers whose books i find more easier to follow. This book does have some charts that are apparently useful for planning. I am not sure if those charts are available online or not. Also i did not see much advice here on cold climate farming. How do you grow a winter cover crop in the snow?

In my search for really basic primers on gardening, I came across this very foundational book that really puts good soil at the heart of good gardening. I appreciated that certain aspects (like double-digging) were explained so thoroughly, with detailed illustrations and charts. There were however many other things that could have been explained more completely. For instance the author explains the whys of crop rotation in the garden, and offers a couple basic rules for rotating the crops: 1) don't plant vegetables from the same family two years in a row (and there is a basic chart of vegetable families) and 2) rotate heavy feeder, heavy giver, light giver and light feeder crops. These latter terms have to do with how the plants affect the soil. The terms are defined and include a few examples of each category of food (e.g. peas, beans, alfalfa, and clover are 'heavy givers') but not a complete categorization of all vegetables. I guess I will have to omit this rule of rotation until I learn which kinds of plants fall into which category. Important gleanings from this book included how to judge soil structure, resources for soil testing, importance of deep soil prep, use of a tool he calls a U-bar (broadfork), and advantages of planting in wide beds vs. single-file rows. I greatly appreciate the permaculture approach of the biodynamic gardening method, and am thrilled to see the diligent research and overwhelming success of this team of researchers in producing high yields with fewer resources. I feel substantially more prepared and enthusiastic for this year's garden!