Book Review: “Gardneing When it Counts – Growing Food in Hard Times”

Book Review and Commentary - Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times (Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series)
by Steve Solomon, Introduction/

Chapter I, con’t: “Size of your garden”

• “As a rough gauge, take the 2,00-square foot wartime allotment plot in the United Kingdom. Britain’s cool and frequently cloudy summers mean that most vegetables grow more slowly than they usually do in the United States or southern Canada. But on the plus side, the mild English winters allow gardeners in many areas to harvest frost-hardy crops year-round. The wartime British were not expected to make a complete family diet pot of 2,700 square feet of vegetables. Their staff of life was bread from the local baker. … Probably during the war years vegetables, including potatoes, did not make make up more than a third of the family’s total caloric intake.”
• “ … If your goal is to produce not half, but nearly all the calories and nutrition needed year-round, and your family can depend on the ordinary potato as their healthful staff of life, then you can add more land in order to produce sacks and sacks of nutritious spuds or sweet potatoes. … The good thing about potatoes is that working plots of this scale (from 500 t0 750 square feet per each adult depending on water conditions/SS) can be done entirely with hand tools. To produce the same amount of nutrition by growing cereal grains would require five to ten times as much land per person. The healthful potato is really the thing for getting through hard times.”

PH Comments: We are in strong agreement with Mr. Solomon in his comments regarding the nutritional value found in both Irish and sweet potatoes (and recommend growing both where possible) but again we part company as regards his method of gardening requiring relatively large amounts of land.

Based on our own experience, our observation that the average homeowner/gardener in America has significantly less land to work with than Mr. Solomon proposes,  and at least two major gardening methods that require relatively little land and have proved reliable/productive here and around the world: we support/advocate the more intensive gardening systems found in John Jevons’ “ ‘How To Grow More Vegetables’ “ and Mel Bartholomew’s “Square foot Gardening”.

We plan to continue reviewing Mr. Solomon’s excellent book (and to continue commenting where we think appropriate) coming up as he has produced a wealth of gardening information and insights for dealing with gardening in hard times.

Until a little later then: keep your eyes on the horizon as the weathers changing fast.