[Homestead] Has Anyone Read

Gene GeRue genegerue at ruralize.com
Mon Jan 28 14:04:02 EST 2008


On Jan 28, 2008, at 10:54 AM, Lynda wrote:

> Jeavon's book "How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought  
> Possible On
> Less Land Than You Can Imagine"?

Which version? I started out as a fan but he went commercial on us. He  
has recycled and milked that title for decades. Here is a review I  
wrote:

		
How to Grow More Vegetables: Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other  
Crops
by John Jeavons
Edition: Paperback
   	
62 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars

Double-digging, maybe. Double pages, no., May 31, 2000
	
This title grew from a 1971 experimental garden in Palo Alto,  
California instigated by Alan Chadwick and Stephen Kafka. That garden  
showed that using the biodynamic/French Intensive method produced four  
times more vegetables than conventional techniques.

Biodynamic techniques were developed by Austrian genius Rudolf  
Steiner. French Intensive methods were developed in the 1890s by  
market gardeners outside Paris, a time when horses provided more-than- 
ample fertilizer and the city provided a ready market for vegetables.  
Chadwick studied under Steiner and French gardeners.

The method requires double-digging garden beds and adding compost or  
aged manure. Double-digging to two feet in depth provides loose soil  
that roots easily penetrate. Plants are seeded or transplanted very  
close together and form a living mulch, shading roots, causing greater  
water retention, denying sunlight to weeds. Other aspects of the  
method are planting and transplanting by the phases of the moon and  
daily sprinkling rather than periodical flooding.

This material has been recycled four times since the 1974 typewritten  
edition. I regret to report it is no longer up-to-date gardening  
knowledge, it will intimidate beginning gardeners, and it will bore  
experienced gardeners. There is only one new chapter, titled  
Sustainability, which is mostly promotion of Ecology Action. In  
addition, Jeavons seems confused. In the first four editions he wrote  
that he was teaching us the "biodynamic/French intensive method" of  
Steiner and French gardeners as learned and taught by Chadwick. Now in  
a chapter titled A Perspective for the Future, he writes that his work  
is based on the "Chinese Biointensive way of farming." Yet nowhere  
does he advocate or tell how to use humanure, which is the basis of  
Chinese food production, as first shown by F.H. King in his book,  
Farmers of Forty Centuries. Only in the bibliography do we find book  
listings under the heading: Human Waste. The huge bibliography (36  
pages, was 22 pages in the last edition) apparently lists every book  
and catalog in the Ecology Action library but there is NO INDEX! I  
find the lack of an index in a nonfiction book to be unforgivable. For  
instance, looking for crop rotation or mulching methods means scanning  
the entire 201 pages--and coming up empty.

There are pages and pages of drawings and technical charts that most  
readers will never use. We find listings of plants and information  
both barely usable--seeds per ounce, pounds consumed per average  
person per year--and important--bed spacing, yields--although there is  
no recognition or advice concerning the many soil types and growing  
zones. One is dismayed to find--in a book titled How to Grow More  
Vegetables--more pages of charts about grain, protein source,  
vegetable oil crops; cover, organic matter, fodder crops; energy,  
fiber paper and other crops; tree and cane crops--20 pages in all,  
than about vegetable crops--8 pages.

Promotion of Ecology Action uses a fourteen-page chapter in addition  
to six more pages of self-promotion in the Sustainability chapter. If  
you want to support Jeavons' work, send a check to Ecology Action, or  
buy his book, The Sustainable Vegetable Garden, adapted from this book  
by co-author Carol Cox, which is smaller and less expensive and has  
all his best stuff without the wasted pages of charts, drawings and  
promotion, and it has an index! If you want current gardening  
information, read authors such as Eliot Coleman and Dick Raymond who  
are progressive and work with all garden designs, including the mulch  
method first popularized by Ruth Stout and now used by hundreds of my  
gardening friends across the country. Most of us have tried the double- 
dig method and have long since moved on. I recommend you not waste  
your time, except maybe once for new gardens, depending on soil  
conditions. Thereafter, use mulch, save your back and spend your time  
and energy on better pursuits.



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