Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener’s Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting
Most books about producing your own food are aimed at rural readers with a substantial amount of outdoor space. This one is aimed at suburban and urban readers with little or no outdoor space. It focuses on “square inch” methods that can get great results from a tiny yard, sidewalk strip, balcony, patio – or even indoor locations such as a windowsill or kitchen.
First the author introduces some reasons for growing at least part of your own food, including climate change, peak oil, health, and flavor. Subsequent chapters explain how to design a food system suited to the space you have and choosing what foods to grow. Then come chapters on buying or building containers for growing vegetables and how to grow plants vertically. Learn about transplants and crop cycling, as well as which varieties of fruits and berries make good container plants.
Later chapters introduce more unusual types of foods that do not require conventional garden space to raise. These include sprouts, yogurt and other fermented foods, and mushrooms. There’s also a comparison of the pros and cons of small livestock suited to some suburban and urban areas, such as chickens, bees, and worms. Finally, the author discusses survival during resource shortages, including typical emergencies such as storms and power outages, and ways of helping build a more sustainable future.
Overall, the book is well constructed (and printed on recycled paper). The tone is casual and personal, giving the impression that ordinary people can and do succeed at the activities described herein. The chapters contain plenty of contact information for companies that sell organic seeds, gardening supplies, sprouting gear, mushroom spawn, etc. Black-and-white photographs and charts illustrate key points. Brief notes and resources appear at the end of the book. Alas, there is no index, a significant flaw in a nonfiction book.
Fresh Food from Small Spaces is most useful to novice or intermediate food producers who live in a town or city. This is a good general guide to many subtopics of food production; you could find better books on the individual chapter topics, but that would take a lot more space and you’d have to adapt many things from rural to urban use. This book would also make a nice gift for someone interested in such things, particularly tucked into a basket along with a self-watering planter, a sprouter, or a set of fermentation crocks. Recommended.
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