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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

> There has never been a sustainable city anywhere on the planet. 
> Sustainable villages, yes. Sustainable camps, yes. But not cities. 
> Civilization is going to crash, whether or not we help bring this about.

That's as far as I can read. I presume the writer makes his money with this 
kind of stuff.

Suspect he has not bothered to read the history of cities, which have been 
around much longer than oil-powered anything. Suspect he has not read how 
Paris had a wonderful loop of horse manure to intensive gardens and veggies 
to Parisians. Yes, that is where we get the term: French Intensive Gardening.

For those interested in the latter, here is a negative review I wrote in 
Amazon.com that gives the history:

How to Grow More Vegetables: Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops 
by John Jeavons
Edition: Paperback
Price: $17.95
Availability: This item is currently unavailable.

13 used & new from $6.75

53 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
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.