Read The Tao of Vegetable Gardening Cultivating Tomatoes Greens Peas Beans Squash Joy and Serenity Carol Deppe 9781603584876 Books
Read The Tao of Vegetable Gardening Cultivating Tomatoes Greens Peas Beans Squash Joy and Serenity Carol Deppe 9781603584876 Books
Download As PDF : The Tao of Vegetable Gardening Cultivating Tomatoes Greens Peas Beans Squash Joy and Serenity Carol Deppe 9781603584876 Books
The Tao of Vegetable Gardening explores the practical methods as well as the deeper essence of gardening. In her latest book, groundbreaking garden writer Carol Deppe (The Resilient Gardener, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties) focuses on some of the most popular home garden vegetables―tomatoes, green beans, peas, and leafy greens―and through them illustrates the key principles and practices that gardeners need to know to successfully plant and grow just about any food crop.
Deppe’s work has long been inspired and informed by the philosophy and wisdom of Tao Te Ching, the 2,500-year-old work attributed to Chinese sage Lao Tzu and the most translated book in the world after the Bible. The Tao of Vegetable Gardening is organized into chapters that echo fundamental Taoist concepts Balance, Flexibility, Honoring the Essential Nature (your own and that of your plants), Effortless Effort, Non-Doing, and even Non-Knowing. Yet the book also offers a wealth of specific and valuable garden advice on topics as diverse as
•  The Eat-All Greens Garden, a labor- and space-efficient way to provide all the greens a family can eat, freeze, and dry―all on a tiny piece of land suitable for small-scale and urban gardeners.
•  The growing problem of late blight and the future of heirloom tomatoes―and what gardeners can do to avoid problems, and even create new resistant varieties.
•  Establishing a Do-It-Yourself Seed Bank, including information on preparing seeds for long-term storage and how to “dehybridize†hybrids.
•  Twenty-four good places to not plant a tree, and thirty-seven good reasons for not planting various vegetables.
Designed for gardeners of all levels, from beginners to experienced growers, The Tao of Vegetable Gardening provides a unique frame of reference a window to the world of nature, in the garden and in ourselves.
Read The Tao of Vegetable Gardening Cultivating Tomatoes Greens Peas Beans Squash Joy and Serenity Carol Deppe 9781603584876 Books
"I love all of Deppe's books. I was anticipating this one, but for me, the writing is not as well thought out as usual. The writing is a bit all over the place. Some is about gardening and some is about random musings of the garden which I could really do without. I'll explain. There is this whole movement of do-it-yourselfer's, bloggers and the likes, that recycle information (some of it they never experienced.) and sell it as if it is their own. Ulgh! And I am tired of buying books with all that recycled gardening info that helps no one.
Carol Deppe is the opposite of these scammers. She really knows her stuff and when I read her words I learn an incredible amount about gardening, from basic biology to genetics to the amounts you should plant and what specific kinds and results from her experiments and how to do your own experiments and what to be looking for to improve. I really hold her writing to a much higher standard- her books are my most used and most favorite. This book is all of that, and I did learn new things, especially in the tomato section about genetics and the eat all greens section about how to be self-sufficient in growing those and how nutritious they are, but I found half of the book really useless for me. The book seems a bit rushed for me, half impeccably done and half I could really do without. That being said I would still recommend it to serious growers because it still has new, valuable information from a skilled grower."
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Tags : The Tao of Vegetable Gardening Cultivating Tomatoes, Greens, Peas, Beans, Squash, Joy, and Serenity [Carol Deppe] on . <em>The Tao of Vegetable Gardening</em> explores the practical methods as well as the deeper essence of gardening. In her latest book,Carol Deppe,The Tao of Vegetable Gardening Cultivating Tomatoes, Greens, Peas, Beans, Squash, Joy, and Serenity,Chelsea Green Publishing,1603584870,Vegetable gardening,Vegetable gardening.,Botany plant sciences,Commercial horticulture,East Asian Indian philosophy,GARDENING,GARDENING / Essays,GARDENING / Organic,GARDENING / Vegetables,GENERAL,Gardening Plants,Gardening / Horticulture,Gardening/Essays Narratives,Gardening/Organic,Gardening/Plants,Gardening plants,Gardening plants cultivation guides,General Adult,HOUSE HOME / Sustainable Living,Horticulture,Non-Fiction,Organic,Organic farming,Organic gardening,Oriental Indian philosophy,PHILOSOPHY / Taoist,Philosophy/Taoist,SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Horticulture,Self-sufficiency,Self-sufficiency 'green' lifestyle,Sustainable agriculture,TECHNOLOGY ENGINEERING / Agriculture / Organic,TECHNOLOGY / Agriculture / Sustainable Agriculture,Taoism,Taoist,Techniques,United States,VEGETABLE CROPS,Vegetable gardening,Vegetable gardening.,Vegetables,cultivate; tomatoes,GARDENING / Essays,GARDENING / Organic,GARDENING / Vegetables,Gardening/Essays Narratives,Gardening/Organic,HOUSE HOME / Sustainable Living,Organic,PHILOSOPHY / Taoist,Philosophy/Taoist,SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Horticulture,TECHNOLOGY ENGINEERING / Agriculture / Organic,TECHNOLOGY / Agriculture / Sustainable Agriculture,Taoist,Vegetables,Gardening / Horticulture,Vegetable Crops,Gardening/Plants,Botany plant sciences,Commercial horticulture,East Asian Indian philosophy,Gardening plants cultivation guides,Organic farming,Organic gardening,Self-sufficiency 'green' lifestyle,Sustainable agriculture,Taoism,GARDENING,Gardening plants,Horticulture,Oriental Indian philosophy,Self-sufficiency
The Tao of Vegetable Gardening Cultivating Tomatoes Greens Peas Beans Squash Joy and Serenity Carol Deppe 9781603584876 Books Reviews :
The Tao of Vegetable Gardening Cultivating Tomatoes Greens Peas Beans Squash Joy and Serenity Carol Deppe 9781603584876 Books Reviews
- Carol Deppe has a new book out. Readers of my blog will know I really like her stuff as discussed in my corn post, but I'm not sure if you know why.
It's not just that she provides a lot of practical information not provided elsewhere. All the books on my gardening shelf have that distinction, which is why they were purchased as opposed to the scores I just borrowed from the library and returned. There's only about 5-6 of them there frankly.
Carol's books are not on my shelf; Carol's books are on my , and besides my itself, I have a app on my phone. Carol's books are with me in the garden so I can look stuff up right when I need it.
But again, it's not just the wealth of information she provides. A lot of it is just... her.
First, I Just Like Her
There are certain authors you read and it's not just the story (for fiction) or information (for nonfiction) that is enjoyable; you just know you'd like them if you met them in person. Carol infuses enough of her personal experiences and thoughts into her books that I really get that. Aside from piles of useful info no other book has provided, I just know if she weren't on the wrong coast, if we sat down one night after dinner with a cup of coffee, we'd be up all night talking. Always assuming she liked me, of course!
There's few authors who've hit me like this. C. S. Lewis is one. Heinlein absolutely was another. Nancy Friday is a third. None of these folks write gardening books though. As far as authors go, this particular bit of my life is only "shared" with Carol.
Carol Approaches Gardening as a Scientist
Carol experiments with gardening like I do with cooking. As an example, all the rest of us gardeners buy inoculant for our peas and beans, cause we know we're supposed to. The symbiotic bacteria allow legumes to extract nitrogen from the air. Every single seed catalog, every gardening book, tells us to do this. Instead of following the instructions, Carol instead inoculated half a crop and didn't inoculate the other half, proving to herself it didn't matter at all.
In her new book, I particularly enjoyed her experiments with regards to whether carrots really do love tomatoes. Hilarious!
The Resilient Gardener (previous book)
I've read this book through easily 10 times in a year, not to mention the number of times I searched for reminders of her advice while out in the garden.
Though it is largely about how to grow real food crops for serious calories dry beans, squash, corn, potatoes and eggs; it is also about how to garden in the practical sense. Having a great heirloom corn around isn't nearly so handy if you don't know how to cook it.
And as another example, she doesn't just tell you why you have to weed, but which hoes she's found most useful, how to use them without straining your back or wrists and how to sharpen them.
There's gobs of useful information gleaned from years of gardening experience boiled down and useful not only for beginners, but for experienced gardeners as well.
If you are a prepper, of either the gardening or cooking variety, this book is for you.
The Tao of Vegetable Gardening (new book)
Besides going all Zen on us, Carol again addresses both the beginner gardener and more experienced gardener in her new book with many practical tips. The crops covered include tomatoes, greens and fresh peas and beans, more typical of the crops newbie gardeners grow than the previous book.
The book wasn't supposed to be released until late January, but I pre-ordered the version weeks earlier and it was delivered the next day. So I had read it twice before it's release date!
As expected, she covered the crops in detail, provided much practical information from her years of experience and many personal stories. But honestly, I didn't buy it for those reasons.
There were two topics I was particularly interested in what Carol calls eat-all greens and late blight.
Eat-all Greens
This is a method Carol came up with to make greens easy to deal with. Basically, it involves planting a fast-growing greens crop at the appropriate density that it grows upright out of the dirt. Then to harvest, you whack it off high enough to avoid the ickiest outer leaves and dirt, so you have a nice bunch of greens ready to cook without doing a bunch of clean up post-harvest. She explains this system and the appropriate spacing for her favorite greens.
Unfortunately, she does not like chard, which is my primary spring/summer green, so I shall have to experiment to find the best spacing to use it for eat-all greens. And while she does do a kale, which is my primary fall/winter green, it's not my favorite kale, so I'll have to experiment with that too.
Late Blight
This is a disease that is spreading through North America affecting tomato crops. It is related to the disease that caused the Irish potato famine, so pretty serious stuff.
When I saw this was one of the topics of her book, I freaked out a little bit. See, last year, my tomatoes started getting icky towards the end of the season. The thing is, I had so darned many of them, and was so far behind on processing them, that I didn't care. Hubby asked me at one point what was wrong with them and I just said it's probably because I'm not watering them cause I have too darned many tomatoes. But when I saw Carol was covering the topic, I googled for pictures and saw I had this nasty stuff.
The thing is, not knowing about it, I did everything wrong. I threw tomatoes that didn't seem worth processing over the fence for the chickens, nicely spreading the stuff around through the surrounding yard. I left the vines in the garden after I tore them off their support, cause no other nightshade is going to grow there for a while. So I've got this stuff all over.
I think this year to get a primary tomato crop, I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and spray a fungicide. The copper stuff seems to be basically the copper salt of a fatty acid, which does not strike me as too bad. But it will be the very first time I've sprayed stuff in my garden. 13 years here, and I've never added anything but compost, wood ash and some minerals before. (
Carol provides a list of the heirlooms that seem to have some resistance. I grow Brandywines for fresh eating cause they're famous for yumminess and are from right here, Pennsylvania. I grow Matt's Wild Cherry cause it's the only cherry I've ever liked, but only a plant or two cause I just eat them outside, they're too small to bother hauling in the house.
But my beloved Opalkas! This variety is what I grow most of for processing. They're yummy enough fresh, but they're just HUGE sausage-shaped tomatoes, thick and almost no juice or seeds. I tried a number of paste-types before I settled on these and I adore them. And if I don't do something, they may cease to exist cause of late blight.
Here's the deal, I don't save seeds. I never have. I approve of seed-saving. I pretty much only grow open-pollinated stuff so seed saving is possible. I want seed catalogs to keep doing the growouts, so I keep buying the seed. I just have never been a hardcore gardening geek like Carol is.
Last year was the first time I had planned to save seed, Carol's Magic Manna because I wanted to keep growing it. I wanted to acclimate it to my region. And frankly, Carol is one person and the stuff might go away if something happens to her and I WANT it. Unfortunately, my chickens were blissfully unaware of how important this corn was, they broke through my fence and ate all my corn. Having put up a new and more chicken-proof fence, I have ordered more seed from her this year.
That was my first time even intending to save seed and it failed. But I've certainly never considered breeding. I mean, I just grow stuff. That's what I do. The complicated stuff is for other people.
Carol is a biologist and therefore has a different attitude to breeding than I do. I only ever took a single genetics course as an undergraduate and all I really recall is gobs of fruit flies were involved. As a graduate student, I took a recombinant DNA course. Dammit Jim, I'm a chemist, not a geneticist!
Carol manages to explain how to breed our favorite heirlooms with hybrids to achieve blight-resistance. And her explanations are such that even those of us who have forgotten more about genetics than we ever knew, thus yielding an actual negative knowledgebase, can follow her reasoning.
Apparently, I'm going to have to get into this as she does not seem to love Opalkas like I do and they may cease to exist if I don't do something.
And That's The Other Reason I Love Her Books
Chickens notwithstanding, I attempted to grow a flour corn last year - for the first time. And next year, I am going to give over my entire SFG to breeding experiments to try to build a blight-resistant Opalka.
And THAT is the mark of a truly great book, that after you've read it, you change your actual behavior.
But I need to read her Breeding Your Own Vegetable Varieties book first...
If You Are a Gardener, Buy Her Books
Seriously. And if you are NOT a gardener, but want to cook more fresh foods, at least buy The Resilient Gardener. - I love all of Deppe's books. I was anticipating this one, but for me, the writing is not as well thought out as usual. The writing is a bit all over the place. Some is about gardening and some is about random musings of the garden which I could really do without. I'll explain. There is this whole movement of do-it-yourselfer's, bloggers and the likes, that recycle information (some of it they never experienced.) and sell it as if it is their own. Ulgh! And I am tired of buying books with all that recycled gardening info that helps no one.
Carol Deppe is the opposite of these scammers. She really knows her stuff and when I read her words I learn an incredible amount about gardening, from basic biology to genetics to the amounts you should plant and what specific kinds and results from her experiments and how to do your own experiments and what to be looking for to improve. I really hold her writing to a much higher standard- her books are my most used and most favorite. This book is all of that, and I did learn new things, especially in the tomato section about genetics and the eat all greens section about how to be self-sufficient in growing those and how nutritious they are, but I found half of the book really useless for me. The book seems a bit rushed for me, half impeccably done and half I could really do without. That being said I would still recommend it to serious growers because it still has new, valuable information from a skilled grower. - This is my favorite author of books dealing with gardening . I have loaned her books to a number of people and they have all bought their own copies. (They also returned the copies I loaned them, which is sadly not always true. I'm not sure if this was an effect of her writing, or just some inexplicable desire on their part to remain friends with me.) Some people are intimidated by her vocabulary. She is describing how to select seed to save, how to select for resistance to late blight in tomatoes (and why that is such a bid deal that is going to get even worse), how to de-hybridize commercial seed and cross it with heirloom varieties and why it is up to us if we want to save those varieties. She is trained as a scientist and uses language that is necessary transmit this information. This is good stuff and it is as deep as it needs to be and really well presented. If this doesn't immediately appeal to you, I would suggest checking out one of her books from a library and immersing yourself in it. You will not be disappointed. She is a good writer and a very interesting person. Then go and buy all her books. If you want them autographed or if you want some of the seed she has developed, check out her website http//www.caroldeppe.com/ Recommended!
- I've been gardening for years, and I'm at the point where I need expert advice instead of beginner advice. Carol's two books are reference books written in a novelist format. I've never read gardening books that I couldn't wait to get back to every day until I found Carol Deppe. My favorite quote comes from her list of 'Thirty-seven Reasons for Not Planting Various Vegetables' and is #21. "Does it meet the WIRHaMoTo standard? 'Would I rather have more tomatoes?' " Update 6/24 I thought it important to update on how using Carol Deppe's principles are working Fabulously! I double-dug my pea bed, and planted Oregon Giant Sugar in circles around tomato cages like Carol said. This is the first year I've had tons and tons of peas--my first success in 7 years! The Oregon Giant Sugar is amazing like she said because you can use as snow peas early, and then later for eating like a sugar snap as the peas get older. They don't get mealy the larger they get.
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