review by Jack Kittredge
Kimmerer is a Native American Potawatomi, a professor with a PhD in botany, a single mother, a deep thinker and a very gifted writer. This book is composed of 30-some essays in which she reflects on the various truths she has come to know through those different lenses.
Her stories often start as simple memories, listening to a tribal myth or learning to make a woven basket from black ash. She writes about the memory — explaining it and how it fits into her Indigenous culture, talking about how it might be seen in the western scientific world, gently exploring the strengths and weaknesses of the various points of view, and ultimately drawing out of the whole narrative some very surprising insights about ourselves and our relationship to nature.
[Read more…] about Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
At the close of the past century, the revitalized draft animal power movement was proceeding steadily with its initial plowing, cutting a fresh regenerative swath nationwide into the stagnant and wearisome, mono-cultured agribusiness that has dominated that landscape since mid-century. The degraded petro chemical approach to farming is “going by the way-side,” replaced by the single- and multi-hitch plow alike and the sweet scent and “invigorative natural processes” of the closed-farm fertility.
Almost fifty years after the first Earth Day, enormous amounts of food scraps are still wasted instead of being returned to the soil, where they belong. James McSweeney wants to be part of the solution by helping people develop successful community-scale composting systems that focus on food scraps, and with this richly detailed manual you can benefit from the composting expertise he has acquired over many years of working with hundreds of composters managing every phase and aspect of the composting process and the composting enterprise.
I try to start my tomatoes extra early, and know I risk inducing “transplant shock” in some portion of them when I begin transplanting into my unheated hoophouse in mid-April. This spring, with the first batch I was scrupulous about covering them at night with several layers of row cover, but got a bit lazy with the later transplants, because after all it was already May and I was growing inside, so really, they should be fine. Here in southern New England, the entire month of May was cold and cloudy, and although they survived, still to this day (I am writing in mid-July) many of those later transplants haven’t taken off—they are thin, knotty, and stunted, and sporting early fruit clusters that will be their downfall, unless I snip them off. Meanwhile, the tomatoes I transplanted the earliest, and pampered through their first several weeks in the ground, are taller than I am and bearing gloriously.
review by Liz Henderson
review by Bob Banning
Gardeners are experimentalists—we try new varieties, push the limits of weather, till or don’t. We observe, try something new, and observe again. Any gardener who has been at this a while accumulates a pretty large store of knowledge about the what, when and where, but less of the why. We learn that peas need a tight trellis to climb, while beans will gladly climb a straight pole. But why the difference? We know that topping a Brussels sprout plant will promote heavier sprouts, but why?
I know what you are thinking: “I don’t want to READ ABOUT sustainability, I want to DO SOMETHING.” I feel the same way. Well, the good news is that there is something you CAN DO — right now, without writing to Congress and without waiting for the next election.
reviewed by Julie Rawson