Review: Small-Plot, High-Yield Gardening, by Sal Gilbertie
Small-Plot, High-Yield Gardening: How to Grow Like a Pro, Save Money, and Eat Well by Turning Your Back (or Front or Side) Yard Into An Organic Produce Garden by Sal Gilbertie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
MCL.
I might buy this book. It’s a good complement to The Square-Foot Garden, although he does not plant with quite that method. This book has more background knowledge information about soil and compost and plants, and more details about the work and time involved, including a break-down for starting slow the first year with easy plants and transplants to starting your own transplants indoors by year 3 or 4. His idea of “small plot” is still pretty large for a typical suburban yard. His primary plan is a 2,000 sq. ft. plot, and the smallest plan he includes is 20×20.
His book is about organic gardening, but he doesn’t come across as a greenie. His argument for gardening with organic amendments rather than chemical fertilizers is that organic practices build your soil and grow more nutritious vegetables; chemical fertilizer methods, he says, are short-sighted methods based on science that is too simplistic. After reading In Defense of Food, which expands that exact same argument, I saw his point. Besides, adding a scoop of manure or compost around a plant instead of finding the correct fertilizer formula for the different plants actually seems much easier!
Your last two reviewed books have made it onto my “buy very soon” list. Thanks!
I bought this book and I’d say that it’s more than a complement to the Square Foot Gardening book.
I suppose books that suggest something like gardening is really easy to do encourages people to get started. I’m sure that if I knew that my work would be rained out (last summer), forestalled by pests and extreme heat (this summer), and that I needed to do research on pests and diseases, I would never have started. But last year, eating cucumbers, tomatoes, and eggplant that tasted nothing like anything found in the supermarket got me hooked.
I agree about the size of the gardens in this book. This year my garden was 27 sq ft in raised beds and another 12 sq ft in containers. Next year I’m expanding my raised beds to 145 sq ft. I plan to start seed from scratch.