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    Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener's Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting
    Unavailable
    Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener's Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting
    Unavailable
    Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener's Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting
    Ebook246 pages3 hours

    Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener's Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting

    By R. J. Ruppenthal

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Books on container gardening have been wildly popular with urban and suburban readers, but until now, there has been no comprehensive "how-to" guide for growing fresh food in the absence of open land. Fresh Food from Small Spaces fills the gap as a practical, comprehensive, and downright fun guide to growing food in small spaces. It provides readers with the knowledge and skills necessary to produce their own fresh vegetables, mushrooms, sprouts, and fermented foods as well as to raise bees and chickens—all without reliance on energy-intensive systems like indoor lighting and hydroponics.

    Readers will learn how to transform their balconies and windowsills into productive vegetable gardens, their countertops and storage lockers into commercial-quality sprout and mushroom farms, and their outside nooks and crannies into whatever they can imagine, including sustainable nurseries for honeybees and chickens. Free space for the city gardener might be no more than a cramped patio, balcony, rooftop, windowsill, hanging rafter, dark cabinet, garage, or storage area, but no space is too small or too dark to raise food.

    With this book as a guide, people living in apartments, condominiums, townhouses, and single-family homes will be able to grow up to 20 percent of their own fresh food using a combination of traditional gardening methods and space-saving techniques such as reflected lighting and container "terracing." Those with access to yards can produce even more.

    Author R. J. Ruppenthal worked on an organic vegetable farm in his youth, but his expertise in urban and indoor gardening has been hard-won through years of trial-and-error experience. In the small city homes where he has lived, often with no more than a balcony, windowsill, and countertop for gardening, Ruppenthal and his family have been able to eat at least some homegrown food 365 days per year. In an era of declining resources and environmental disruption, Ruppenthal shows that even urban dwellers can contribute to a rebirth of local, fresh foods.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChelsea Green Publishing
    Release dateNov 5, 2008
    ISBN9781603581455
    Unavailable
    Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener's Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting

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    Reviews for Fresh Food from Small Spaces

    3.5/5

    28 ratings3 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      This is a good book for ideas - the author dips into gardening, beekeeping, mushroom growing, sprouts, etc... with more expertise in the gardening and sprouting areas. I may not be as ready as he is to contemplate more closely any future shortages in resources that will make more urban food production necessary, but I'm thinking I might try raspberries this spring and may try out some sprouting this winter. The writing style made my eyes roll from time to time (supernouns and "you may laugh" especially) - but I've got the book put aside to go investigate some of the web resources that he lists. I'd like to see more books on urban food production out there.
    • 4/5
      This is an ideas book more than a how-to book. A lot of the advice is "go see your local plant nursery for advice."But it is still an interesting book, and a more practical galvanizer than Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
    • 3/5
      I keep flipping between 2 1/2 stars and three for this book. What finally tipped it was the fact that there's a nice set of notes for further reading. I've been looking for some more books on practical gardening but haven't been too successful. (I've only recently seriously started looking for). The best, strangely enough, is in the book "The Unprejudice Palate" by Angelo M. Pellegrini. This book almost fills that nitch, but lacks just a bit of information. It seems like it's good to start getting an idea of some things that can be done and has some useful notes for further reading which I will pursue.I think the book would have been better had some of the political and "survival" chapters had been greatly cut down or eliminated. There also seemed a weird balance of amount of space devoted to certain concepts. It seemed like there was almost as many pages devoted talking to how nutritious sprouts were to the space of actually growing them. A simple quotation or two would have sufficed. There were also occasionally talk about equipment that could be created, but I think I would most likely end up searching the Internet for detailed plans.It's not that I'm unsympathetic for the call to grow more locally. It's just that my motivations coming to the book stem more from being able to grow food that is expensive or usually lacking in quality at the store. (Tomatoes are a good example, so are many peppers). There's no reason to try to sell me in this particular book on the horrible looming oil crisis. I'd rather have seen a detailed plan for the self-watering containers. (There's some description and a "before" and "after" picture if I recall correctly).It almost would make it on my wishlist, but it's just a bit too little in the way of practical information. I'd like to see more on space usage (maybe drawings or plans of example spaces), which crops are the most nutritious, what unusual plants aren't sold in stores but might be easily grown and more things like that. I'm going to use this to add some books to my "to read" collection and maybe re-read a chapter in the spring when I see it at the library again.