Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times (Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series, 5)

I thought this was an excellent reference for EXPERIENCED gardeners.I always read 5 star reviews and 1 star reviews before buying any book to get other reader's pros and cons, and this book certainly has both. However, after reading the book, I did feel that some of the negative reviews were grossly unfair. I might not have bought the book after reading the virulent negative reviews, but I had already purchased and read Mr. Solomon's book The Intelligent Gardener and found it was filled with outstanding information on raising nutrient rich vegetables.I have been a gardener for a long time. In that time I have definitely formed opinions on the best way to garden in my climate. Mr. Solomon has as well. He certainly comes off as authoritative, which I believe some interpreted as mere arrogance. I interpreted that attitude as confidence in his methods in the climates he has gardened in. Let's face it, he certainly has a lot of experience and should be able to speak with authority. Certainly, he doesn't know everything about gardening in every climate - no one does - every gardener has their own special challenges - but I, for one, had a lot of ah-ha moments, even after 40 years of gardening and certainly was not offended at his tone.In addition, I was not offened by Mr. Solomon's supposed "trashing" of unethical seed growers, companies, etc. Evidently, I have had some of the same experiences he has with unethical companies and happen to agree with him. He's just willing to "put it out there" and tell the truth. Personally, I appreciated his candor. Yes, some of the seed companies I deal with are not on Mr. Solomon's list, but he described exactly how he determined who he was going to include so you're not in the dark about his choices. And, if your favorite seed company wasn't in business or didn't respond to his questionnaire about their practices, well, it's not going to be included.As far as hard to find, expensive amendments and such, he constantly gives alternatives. One reviewer complained that she/he would never be able to find coprameal (from coconuts). OK, then use the cottonseed meal, soybean meal, linseed meal, or canola seed meal that were all suggested in addition to the copraseed meal. All of these options were included and just about any farm store in America will have cottonseed meal at a reasonable price. If you don't want to use, or can't find tankage, Mr. Solomon's advice is to simply use a bit more of his organic fertilizer mix. Personally, I will not be using tankage, I'll just mix in some bloodmeal for the extra nitrogen needed.I do believe that this book is more for experienced gardeners. I would not give this to a novice who wants to putter in the garden on the weekends and grow a some vegetables for the table. That is not who this book is written for anyway. This book is written for the serious gardener who wants to grow a great deal of their own food and wants it to have the maximum amount of nutrition so they can stay healthy. As a nurse in a farming community, daily caring for people with chronic disease, I am acutely aware of how horrible the American diet is and how nutrient deficient our soils are. Every spring I watch as my farmer neighbor plows his fields and the top soil blows away in the wind, and I watch him spreading 100's of gallons of chemicals on his 600 acre farm to get anything to grow because there is NOTHING in the soil. The chemical Law of Conservation of Matter basically says, "Whatever goes in, comes out," which applies to soil AND compost AND manure as well. I am thankful that Mr. Solomon has done the research on what to put into the soil to get nutrient rich vegetables to come out.This book IS technical which could be construed as "dry". Personally, I want technical. I want to be told exactly why and how something works. If I have to read a little slower because of that, to sit and think about what was written, to intellectually "chew" on an idea, that's OK. If I want light reading, I'll buy a novel.I certainly can understand why some people came away with the idea that the book was negative. It deals honestly with the difficulties of gardening. I garden in pure sand in a sub-tropical climate, beset by humidity, disease and insects, where growing temperate climate vegetables like tomatoes and peppers in a 90 day window between the last frost and 95 degree heat is a challenge at best and often a disaster. I can identify with his perceived negativity. For some of us, gardening is not spreading a little compost, planting a seed, giving it a little water and watching the magic happen. I'm not sure where that place is, but it's not my garden. I would say his "negativity" is "reality" for many of us. Gardening is HARD!I do, however, think that he was unnecessarily negative in regards to seed growing/saving. Gardeners have grown, improved, and saved great seed for 1000's of years. If we had not, we all would have starved by now. He does make it sound like it is pretty much an impossible task for the home gardener to save anything except self-pollinated varieties of vegetables. While difficult, it obviously can be done by the average person. I do think the attitude expressed in the book about seed saving could discourage gardeners from even trying. I would encourage you to read Carol Deppe's Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties and Suzanne Ashworth's Seed to Seed for a more positive, and in my opinion, more helpful view on this topic.Overall, this was a great book with a tremendous amount of information that you won't find many other places. I don't purchase many gardening books any more because nearly all of them are so basic they are a waste of time and money for an experienced gardener. Not this one. This book is definitely not a waste of money for the EXPERIENCED gardener. I also highly recommend that you purchase Mr. Solomon's book the Intelligent Gardener where he has updated the information in this book, especially regarding nutrition. I truly appreciate the fact that he is willing to revise his work and say, with more research and information, that he has found some better ways to do things. That certainly doesn't sound like someone who is arrogant!BUY THE BOOK. YOU WON'T BE DISAPPOINTED.

When I purchased this book, I was expecting to see the author expound on how to subsistence garden in a small area with limited resources. I anticipated recommendations on intensive spacing techniques, a la John Jeavons or the Square Foot Gardening or other Rodale encouraged methods that have become the standard for many organic or low-input gardeners over the last couple of decades. I also expected the method to be time saving.Boy, was I surprised! Instead, the author teaches the old wide-spacing row method, with his own twists gained by years of knowledge and experience. He also explains pretty well what conditions might exist to make this method more productive than intensive planting. What surprised me the most was just how much time a large garden planted this way would take to upkeep using elbow grease only.Ive spent years trying to learn intensive raised bed planting to reduce respource input and minimize the amount of ground required to provide the yield I need. So it took me awhile to really wrap my head around his arguments for his method. I agree with a previous reviewer that this book improves on second reading-or perhaps its just my understanding that gets better the second time around!If you only have a few hundred square feet of space (most suburban lots) and expect to produce even a fraction of the food you would need in a situation "When It Counts" - ie, subsistence-then I would caution against thinking that his method would work for you. Still a worthy book to have for the basic information presented, as long as a grower could adapt these ideas to their own enviorment and resources. If you have room and don't like to put all your gardening eggs in one basket, a large garden area utilizing BOTH methods might be the safest way to increase chances of a yield no matter what the weather throws at you-have one section planted in raised beds, the other in rows.If you are looking for food growing guides to help you learn to become more self sufficient, then IMHO this book is a good choice. But I would pair it with an intensive gardening guide or two, "Square Foot Gardening" for beginning gardeners or those with limited size garden plots, and at least one of the John Jeavons guides such as "How To Grow More Food". Add "Seed to Seed" by Ashworth or another definitive seed saving source and you'll be well on your way to having the written resources you'll use again and again.My advice- there's no single book that will substitute for the experience of getting your hands in the dirt. Buy the books- but dont just put them on the shelf and think you can feed your family if the stores or the money to use them arent there some day. Use the methods, adapt them to your own situation, practice, practice and practice some more- only then will you be able to garden sucessfully "When It Counts".

Excellent book with loads of ideas

This book talks a lot about having a great amount of land, about techniques that involve a lot of time tending to the garden and amending beds with chemicals. It is not a bad gardening technique, but not organic, not accessible to Mr. or Ms Everyone. I would have imagined that gardening for the "hard times" or ""when it counts" would be about how to just rely on your own veggie compost, using your backyard and how to improvise in interesting ways. If the title would have said that I would not had bothered buying the book nor gotten frustrated. But again, the techniques are not wrong or useless. Just against the high density world we live in and definitely opposite to what the title seems to imply to me.I would also point out I do not agree with the list of veggies easy or hard to grow as pointed in the book. Whoever says lettuce is hard to grow makes me wary of their other planting insights because lettuce is actually a beginner's garden friend. Just try it for yourself!

This book is excellent. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It answers questions I'd always wondered about. It answers questions I never even thought to ask. It covers the basics that I never knew. It enhances my knowledge on stuff I thought I knew enough about. I'm MOTIVATED to make the best vegetable garden my property is capable of. I'm changing what I do in my garden every day as a result of reading more of this book. When I finish reading this book, I'll go back to page 1 and read it all again. Things that were a puzzle to me about my garden's failures now make sense! And the stuff that worked like magic now also makes sense! This book makes vegetable gardening really fun (but I'm an engineer, so technical stuff is fun to me)! If I only had this one gardening book and no others, I would have enough; it covers it all.

Yes, Solomon comes across as an arrogant know-it-all. But don't let that keep you from reading his book, though, because after following his suggestions I can say he seriously knows his stuff. The strength of "Gardening" is that it is written for the person who has little money or time. However -- and this is important -- the author does not pander to the survivalist freaks with their doomsday scenarios of a world without money, machines, or friends. Instead, Solomon tells you where your limited funds are best spent and why, which seeds to buy and which you can try to collect from your own harvest, and discusses when to rent machines and when to do stuff by hand. He explains the basics -- like, how to use a hoe, for clueless people like me -- and the scientific -- like, what a C/N ratio is. Most of all, he is a realist, and will happily poke holes in any phantasy of creating a "closed-system" veggie garden. Highly recommended.

A very good, informative and honest book. I'm learning a lot from it.