The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times

by Carol Deppe

Overview

"The Resilient Gardener is so essential, timely and important, and I will recommend it to everyone I know. It doesn't matter if you garden or if you don't-this is practical wisdom good for humans to know."—Deborah Madison, Author of Local Flavors and Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

Scientist/gardener Carol Deppe combines her passion for organic gardening with newly emerging scientific information from many fields — resilience science, climatology, climate change, ecology, anthropology, paleontology, sustainable agriculture, nutrition, health, and medicine. In the last half of The Resilient Gardener, Deppe extends and illustrates these principles with detailed information about growing and using five key crops: potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and eggs.

In this book you’ll learn how to:

•Garden in an era of unpredictable weather and climate change
•Grow, store, and use more of your own staple crops
•Garden efficiently and comfortably (even if you have a bad back)
•Grow, store, and cook different varieties of potatoes and save your own potato seed
•Grow the right varieties of corn to make your own gourmet-quality fast-cooking polenta, cornbread, parched corn, corn cakes, pancakes and even savory corn gravy
•Make whole-grain, corn-based breads and cakes using the author’s original gluten-free recipes involving no other grains, artificial binders, or dairy products
•Grow and use popbeans and other grain legumes
•Grow, store, and use summer, winter, and drying squash
•Keep a home laying flock of ducks or chickens; integrate them with your gardening, and grow most of their feed.

The Resilient Gardener is both a conceptual and a hands-on organic gardening book, and is suitable for vegetable gardeners at all levels of experience. Resilience here is broadly conceived and encompasses a full range of problems, from personal hard times such as injuries, family crises, financial problems, health problems, and special dietary needs (gluten intolerance, food allergies, carbohydrate sensitivity, and a need for weight control) to serious regional and global disasters and climate change. It is a supremely optimistic as well as realistic book about how resilient gardeners and their vegetable gardens can flourish even in challenging times and help their communities to survive and thrive through everything that comes their way — from tomorrow through the next thousand years. Organic gardening, vegetable gardening, self-sufficiency, subsistence gardening, gluten-free living.

"The Resilient Gardener is brilliantly timely, and shows us how to create gardens that can survive our increasingly erratic weather, while supplying key nutrition lacking in most vegetable gardens. This book fills a critical niche, and I recommend it unreservedly."—Toby Hemenway, author of Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781603583152
Publisher:	Rizzoli
Publication date:	10/05/2010
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Oregon plant breeder Carol Deppe, author of The Tao of Vegetable Gardening, holds a PhD in biology from Harvard University and specializes in developing public-domain crops for organic growing conditions, sustainable agriculture, and human survival for the next thousand years. Carol is author of The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times (Chelsea Green, 2010), Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, 2nd ed. (Chelsea Green, 2000), Tao Te Ching: A Window to the Tao through the Words of Lao Tzu (Fertile Valley Publishing, 2010), and Taoist Stories (Fertile Valley Publishing, 2014).

Table of Contents

1. Gardening and resilience
2. The plant-gardener covenant: 33 golden gardening rules
3. Gardening in an era of wild weather and climate change
4. Diet and food resilience
5. Labor and exercise
6. Water and watering
7. Soil and fertility
8. Potatoes
9. The laying flock
10. Squash and pumpkins
11. Beans
12. Corn

Editorial Reviews

"Deppe's idiosyncratic personality shines through her writing-this is as much a series of personal anecdotes by a lifelong expert gardener as a gardening book that will appeal to readers of a similar bent. Ideal for dedicated, independent gardeners who want to focus on food production despite dietary challenges, poor health, or other issues.”—Library Journal

“Uncertain times, caused by an unstable economy, changing weather patterns, or personal injury, result in an expanse of time when the "garden suffers because people have other priorities." With this premise in mind, Deppe introduces the concept of resilient gardening. In Deppe's world, gardening transcends the world of leisurely pursuit and transforms into an act of empowerment.

In twelve intensely detailed chapters, The Resilient Gardener empowers readers with the knowledge they need to design, build, and maintain gardens that can withstand intense hardship and thrive despite periods of complete neglect.

One of the major strengths of this book-and what sets it apart from the deluge of gardening books currently on bookstore shelves-is the union of Deppe's scientific knowledge with her personal gardening experience. The second half of the book details the five essential crops of self-reliance-potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and eggs-and how to grow them. Though these sections are largely "dip and skip" depending on the reader's level of knowledge, they are expressed in crisp, detailed, and incredibly fluid prose. Deppe is able to transmit the nitty-gritty of gardening through invaluable parcels of personal anecdotes that make the material relatable and a pleasure to read.
Deppe's unique approach to her topic makes The Resilient Gardener an appealing selection for both experienced and beginner gardeners, as well as readers interested in issues of sustainability and global reform.”—ForeWord Reviews

"This book presents an in-depth seed-to-table understanding of five culturally significant and life-sustaining crops: corn, beans, squash, potatoes, and eggs. Its power and promise are rooted in Deppe's lived experience and revealed in the careful detail by which she shares it. This book is frank, plainspoken, and intimate. The basis for the author's diet is her intolerance for grain. She has celiac disease and cannot digest wheat or any of its near relatives in the grass family: rye, barley, oats, or triticale, and so has learned from much difficult experience to exclude completely from her table the foods most people depend upon for their daily bread. The basis of the book, however, is her determination to provide a reliable supply of staple food for her kitchen and to be responsible for every aspect of that from breeding and selecting the crops she uses to stabilizing and sharing the seed, to understanding the genetics, to exploring, cooking, and relishing the palate of flavors she nurtures and the rich and deeply satisfying foods that in turn nurture her, It is this quality of determination and careful empirical and practical work that recommends The Resilient Gardener to serious gardeners and home economists. Deppe is doing what many of us aspire to do.”— Permaculture Activist

"The Resilient Gardener is so essential, timely and important, and I will recommend it to everyone I know. It doesn't matter if you garden or if you don't-this is practical wisdom good for humans to know, passed on by a careful student who has deeply studied her life. Carol Deppe's lens is the garden-which is great for gardeners, but really, she speaks clearly to all of us. If you try to think like Deppe, you will find you have a new view of your life no matter who you are. This is a wise and intelligent book. Hats off to Carol Deppe!"—Deborah Madison, Author of Local Flavors and Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

"In the years since Carol Deppe wrote the classic Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, she has continued to grow in deep wisdom and experience. The Resilient Gardener is brilliantly timely, and shows us how to create gardens that can survive our increasingly erratic weather, while supplying key nutrition lacking in most vegetable gardens. This book fills a critical niche, and I recommend it unreservedly."—Toby Hemenway, author of Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture

"The Resilient Gardener is the most comprehensive and detailed book about gardening that I have read to date, and I could not find one sentence that I would quibble with. Not only does Deppe discuss all the immediate, nose- to- the- grindstone kind of information about producing and using homegrown food, but also all the surrounding environmental and cultural aspects of gardening that are so vital to success. A must read for beginning gardeners, and full of details even the most experienced will find invaluable."—Gene Logsdon, author of Small-Scale Grain Raising and Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind

"The Resilient Gardener gives concrete examples of how to deal with diet, climate, and economic changes before the need arises. Deppe challenges us to experiment with and practice all aspects of gardening, seed saving and food storage, and advises on the growing need to meet special food and climate requirements in the face of our food system's fragility. This book is an invaluable tool for gardeners and farmers as we experience more and more volatility in our food systems."—Suzanne Ashworth, author of Seed to Seed

"Carol Deppe is informative, funny, and intriguing as she guides us through every phase of gardening—dispelling myths while also orienting us to the technical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of growing food. The Resilient Gardener is the quintessential guide to gardening from an authority who also knows how to enjoy herself."—Didi Emmons, author of Vegetarian Planet

"Carol Deppe's celiac-friendly approach to gardening and nutrition provides a wealth of information on how to overcome food intolerances many are confronted with each day. If you struggle with food allergies or sensitivities—or want to use natural resources to create a healthy world for you and your family—this book is for you."—Peter H.R. Green, MD, Director, Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University

"Growing food is among the most positive changes anyone can make in the face of uncertainty about the future. The Resilient Gardener is an information-packed resource for people starting or expanding a garden practice. This book empowers readers with skills and understanding, as did Deppe's previous book, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties."—Sandor Ellix Katz, author, Wild Fermentation and The Art of Fermentation

From the Publisher