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  • From: "Charles de Matas" <cdematas@hotmail.com>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] Books
  • Date: Tue, 07 Nov 2006 23:40:01 +0000

My copy of The Scythe Book has arrived at the bookshop so I'm anxious to go and collect it. I'll put in an order for Jeremy Rifkin's entropy book when I go also.
The books I've read so far my Mollison and Jeavons have really inspired me and given me so many ideas that I would like to try out. "Permaculture: a Designer's Manual" opened a whole new world to me. I was particularly impressed by Chapter 10 on the tropics. I never came across a book with such a good understanding of the problems faced in the tropics and so many ideas for improving conditions in these areas. I remember sometimes waking up in the middle of the night and if I could not get back to sleep I would go to P:aDM and read parts of Chapter 10.
I got a new copy of "How to Grow more Vegetables ........" recently. Actually before I received it I was searching through some old boxes of books and found an old edition that I bought about 10 years ago. Anyway the new edition was still a good buy. There is more information on what Jeavons calls energy-efficient and space-efficient crops and what fraction of your acreage should be planted in these crops. Jeavons encourages people to be as self sufficient as possible in food from the land available. One should try to grow energy-efficient crops to meet our calorie needs as these crops produce foods that have a high calorie density. Jeavons is way ahead of our time in his thinking. When more people adopt organic methods there will be a shortage of organic matter with which to make compost, mulch etc. (At present though not enough organic material is recycled) Jeavons is working to find solutions to this problem. He recommends we grow our own materials for composting by using space-efficient crops which will produce a large amount of biomass per unit area.
One might think that Mollison's permaculture and Jeavons' intensive approach are distinct or mutually exclusive: one seeks to minimize human labour and the other is considered by many to be labour intensive. But intensive methods can possible reduce the amount of labour if only done on a small area. I'm still interested in biointensive methods because land here is very expensive and I don't want to buy any more land, I just want to use what I have more effectively, I'm also getting interested in container gardening.

Charles.

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