The 5 Books That Most Inspired Our Approach to Growing
We’re often asked on our workshops and courses for suggestions of books and resources that most helped us in designing our growing space and gardening with nature and true to the principles of permaculture. Well, with Christmas just around the corner, when many of us have a little more time for reading, I thought I’d share with you five of the books from our library that most inspired the way we grow food here at Glasbren.
Of course, there were many other books, online resources, videos, sites we’ve visited and mentors that influenced our interpretation of the best way to grow lots of food, working with nature. But these are the key texts that offered ideas, techniques, inspiration and, most importantly, a spirit that most spoke to the way I really believed in growing food and tending land. They are the dog eared, dirty t0mes roughed up by how often I’ve turned to them, that have come into the field with me and who’ve offered their wisdom whenever its needed. They were the ‘seed’ books, if you like for what you see at Glasbren HQ today.
Though there is, of course, no substitute for practical, on the ground, hands-in-the-Earth experience, season to season, year to year, there are a few leaders in the fields of permaculture, homesteading, ecological market gardening and h0rticulture who’ve shared their hard-earned knowledge and experience in books, and have been the elders, the guides as we set out to create our edible foodscape here in West Wales.
“In Western civilisation, our elders are books”
Each one offers something different, and I’ve chosen to include each for its contribution in a different lane - it’s important to stress that this article is not about the ‘best’ books for getting started with growing, necessarily. But they are those that, for different reasons, happened to make the most impact on me. Their authors together form a council of elders who’ve helped to guide us young growers towards creating a regenerative, resilient and productive growing space and healthy, fulfilled growers, too! For anyone looking to start a garden, whether on a home-scale, for your community or for growing for market, these books are a great place to start and will give you a good, rounded initiation into life as a food grower and steward of your patch of Earth.
Here’s a quick breakdown of each book and how they helped shape our growing project at Glasbren… Hopefully those of you who know our site, our growing methods and our project ethos will recognise these books in what you see at Glasbren!
“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”
On the island of Shikoku, Japan, farmer Masonobu Fukuoka developed a method and philosophy of natural farming that has rippled through the decades since his book ‘One Straw Revolution’ was published in 1978, and had a profound effect in shaping the thinking of a young Welsh permaculture student thinking about working the land.
His radical ‘Do-Nothing’ approach to growing food tossed traditional convention out of the window. He pioneered a method of growing food on a human scale, observing closely and working with natural cycles, and based on four key principles:
No cultivation - no tilling, plowing or turning the soil. This has very much informed our “no-dig” approach to growing at Glasbren. He harnessed the power of plant roots and plant ground covers to build healthy soil.
No chemical fertilisers - He emphasised that if the orderly cycle of plant and animal life, and the way the soil builds fertility naturally, are left in tact, there is no need for artificial fertility.
Weeds - Fukuoka argues that weeds should be controlled, not elimanted, using mulches and ground covers, letting them play their part in the biological community.
No Pesticides or herbicides - The sensible approach to plant disease and pests, Fukuoka argues, is to grow sturdy, diverse crops in a healthy environment, rather than using chemicals to try to eradicate them.
We’ve tried to carry Fukuoka’s sensitive, intuitive and experimental approach into the way we grow food, and to act from relationship with and understanding of the land. But beyond that, I remember being very moved by his invitation to farm in a way that allows plenty of time to write poetry every day!
“The One Straw Revolution is one of the founding documents of the alternative food movement, and indispensable to anyone hoping to understand the future of food and agriculture”
2. ‘Gardening at the Dragons Gate: At Work in the Wild & Cultivated World’ by Wendy Johnson
“All good gardening happens at the edge of the world, on that seam line where land we long to cultivate meets the untamable wilderness outside the fence. ”
I remember sitting on the floor in the garden shed at the Ecodharma community in the Catalan Pyrenees, where I used to live, engrossed in Wendy Johnson’s wonderful account of her gardening life in the gardens and fields of Green Gulch Farm, the San Francisco Zen Center’s property in Marin County, California. At the time, I was living in a practicing Dharma community, meditating, gardening, building with earth materials and living simply, but the early seeds of an idea were germinating in my imagination, about returning to Wales, where I grew up, to start a land project there, too. The book is full of wisdom and of growing food organically with a deep understanding of nature’s rhythms, but what I found most profound was the way Wendy Johnson understands her buddhist practice as interwoven with her gardening and the lessons she finds in nature and the garden to help her. A critical quality to the book is the philosophy Johnson brings to her gardening practice. As Bill Mckibben described her writing, it’s “deep philosophy with dirt beneath it’s fingernails.” She encourages us to accept joys of gardening with the challenges, and garden wit surrender, non-attachment and, year-on-year, a deeper relationship with the place that we grow.
“Gardening is about relationship—about challenge and change and coincidence. Gardeners interact with the raw stuff of this world: steaming horse poop and black fly maggots, ropes of noxious bindweed and fifteen-inch layers of yellow gumbo clay soil. When you begin to garden, no matter where you dig in, you open yourself to the unknown.”
3. ‘Gaias Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture’ by Toby Hemenway
This would be the first books I would recommend anyone getting into growing food for the first time. It’s one of the best books breaking permaculture principles down into practical gardening techniques. If you want to grow food in a way that creates healthy habitats, stores water, encourages diversity and produces multiple yields from small spaces, this is one of the most helpful and comprehensive guides I’ve found. With beautiful illustrations, it breaks down concepts like plant guilds, companion planting, composting and sheet mulching, water harvesting and forest gardening into easy-to-understand chapters for the beginner gardener. On any permaculture course that I lead, this is where I point anyone looking to apply its principles to gardening and growing food.
“Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden will be recorded in history as a milestone for gardeners and landscapers—a fusion of the practical and the visionary—using the natural intelligence of Earth’s symbiotic communities to strengthen and sustain ecosystems in which humans are a partner, not a competitor. An amazing achievement showing how we can and must live in harmony with nature!”
4. ‘The Resilient Farm and Homestead’ by Ben Falk
Ben Falk’s book shares the strategies, principles and components he’s testing at the Whole Systems Research Farm (WSRF) in Vermont, USA, where’s he’s turned a ‘beat-up old Vermont hill farm’ into a highly productive and biodiverse human-supporting ecosystem. Of all the books that informed my permaculture education and the overall design of the Glasbren foodscape, this one had the biggest impact. It’s a beautiful case study of how poor quality, degraded and damaged land can be transformed and regenerated through thoughtful ‘disturbances’, and how, rather than ‘doing no harm’, humans can be an active, deliberate positive impact on a piece of land.
This book is particularly strong in guiding the reader through the design stages of a project, and Falk offers his own set of 72 principles for the design, implementation and maintenance of regenerative, resilient landscapes, and detailed diagrams and accounts of water systems, Keyline design, annual and perennial vegetables, rotational grazing and ethical animal care, woodland management, medicinal foods and much more. Whether you are starting from scratch or trying to reimagine your smallholding, farm or homestead to be more regenerative and adaptable to the future, this is a great book to have on your shelf.
One thing I love about Ben Falk’s approach, is his focus on Zone 00 - the human body - in the way that he designs for resilience. He considers how integral human fitness, strength, flexibility, nutrition and wellbeing is to a concept of resilience. For Falk it is as important for us to become ‘adaptive animals’ as it is for us to design sustainable homesteads and productive foodscapes. Alongside valuable guidance on tree systems, medicinal foods, firewood storage and ponds, Falk explores techniques for staying at peak health and fitness, for looking after your body over a lifetime working the land and for prioritising these things in your design.
“Our own bodies are the canary in the coal mine of Planet Earth, and the health of these bodies is a direct indicator of the health of Planet Earth”
The climatic characteristics of his site in Vermont were similar to our context here in Wales, and Falk’s way of thinking and interpreting permaculture design really resonated with me. This became a very useful practical manual!
Any of you who’ve visited our site will recognise the principles in this diagram!
5. ‘The Market Gardener’ by Jean-Martin Fortier
The guidance of JM Fortier has been crucial in adapting the ideas and principles in the books above to a market gardening setting, as I transitioned as a grower from home grower to commercial grower for CSA veg boxes.
Jean-Martin shares his knowledge on how to grow a high volume of high-quality vegetables on a small-scale, on 1.5 acres or less and using a biologically intensive approach. This means the maximising of crop yields from a minimal area of land, while seeking to improve the soil, not deplete it. Densely planted, human scale food landscapes, permanent raised beds, using efficient planning and design, good management practices and appropriate tools and technologies.
The book covers everything from laying out your growing space, crop planning, soil amendments and compost practices, sowing, propagating and planting, harvesting and storage of vegetables, as well as an in-depth guide to each of the main vegetables that a market gardener will typically grow in a temperate climate. These crop notes lay out the unique characteristics of each vegetable, their plant families sowing times and, crucially to a CSA crop plan, the number of days to harvest.
This really is a fantastic resource for anyone making the step up from home-grower to market gardener, starting a commercial enterprise or a CSA. It’s also a helpful roadmap for how to not just to make good living, but to make a good life as a farmer.
“‘The Market Gardener’ grew out of a desire to provide aspiring farmers with a tool to help them start their businesses.”
JM Fortier offers a unique, first-of-its-kind online masterclass for emerging market gardeners, helping thousands of people to become successful small-scale ecological growers. Watch this video to find out more.
Of course, there has been a whole library of many more books that have influenced, inspired and shaped the approach we’ve taken to designing our regenerative food landscape, building soil health and growing vegetables for our CSA veg box members, as well as articles, YouTube channels, Instagram profiles, site visits and many influential teachers and leaders in the field over the years. But this is just a taste of the books that shaped the early goings of this project and the approach we’ve taken to growing food, from our philosophy and principles, to the practical growing techniques that we use.
If you’d like to know more about how we created a rich, regenerative and highly-productive small-scale vegetable farm here in West Wales, join us on one of our workshops, trainings or seasonal events here at the farm. Sign up to our newsletter below to stay up-to-date with what’s coming up!
