Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community |...

Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community | Heather Coburn Flores | Harvesting a movement for food security, ecological sustainability and social justice!

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Food Not Lawns: Ho...

	Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community Heather Coburn Flores Chelsea Green, 2006 - 344 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Gardening can be a political act. Creativity, fulfillment, connection, revolution--it all begins when we get our hands in the dirt. Food Not Lawns combines practical wisdom on ecological design and community-building with a fresh, green perspective on an age-old subject. Activist and urban gardener Heather Flores shares her nine-step permaculture design to help farmsteaders and city dwellers alike build fertile soil, promote biodiversity, and increase natural habitat in their own "paradise gardens." But Food Not Lawns doesn?t begin and end in the seed bed. This joyful permaculture lifestyle manual inspires readers to apply the principles of the paradise garden--simplicity, resourcefulness, creativity, mindfulness, and community--to all aspects of life. Plant "guerilla gardens" in barren intersections and medians; organize community meals; start a street theater troupe or host a local art swap; free your kitchen from refrigeration and enjoy truly fresh, nourishing foods from your own plot of land; work with children to create garden play spaces. Flores cares passionately about the damaged state of our environment and the ills of our throwaway society. In Food Not Lawns, she shows us how to reclaim the earth one garden at a time.

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An Inspiring Book

Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community is an inspiring book for any person who wants to find healthy ways to grow his or her own food in a natural way and to encourage others in the neighborhood to do the same. The book provides both the expected common-sense approach to improving soil conditions and water retention through composting and other methods, but also offers suggestions that inspire the rebellious, anti-establishment side of the reader to surface: guerilla gardening tactics and suggestions for rerouting and filtering gray water, thus encouraging water recycling rather than wasting water. The prose style is easy-to-understand and engaging, with drawings that help the reader understand the suggestions being made. Most interesting to me personally was the idea that lawns of grass were developed as a way to display wealth, and the idea of turning your yard into one large, practical-yet-beautiful, varied garden is greatly appealing.

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Harvesting a movement for food security, ecological sustainability and social justice!

Having never been able to afford proper permaculture education and living far away from where such courses are offered anyway, I found this book to be a real blessing, full of practical information on polycultural organic gardening, composting, vermiculture, ecological design, appropriate technology, edible weeds, biodynamic farming, seed stewardship, community organizing, conflict resolution, activism, ecological pedagogy, and more. Certainly, if you are interested in planting a backyard or community garden, then this book is one that you will want to read immediately. With our present capitalist agricultural system destroying the biosphere and our health via global warming, deforestation, pesticide run-off, top soil erosion, biotechnology, and cancer, one really needs to read and encourage others to read this amazing book. More importantly, we need to reconnect with the land, get some soil beneath our fingernails, and begin planting the seeds of that better world we're always talking and dreaming about. Thank you H.C. Flores for this excellent book and for all the inspiring things you do to build a more rational, socially just, and ecological society!

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Not a how to book, or is it

Anyone who picks up this book expecting to find a "How to" manual on converting your lawn into an edible garden will be disappointed. However, if you're looking for some fresh ideas on not only changing out your lawn for a garden mixed with a little permaculture, activism, optimism, and community building ideas, this is the book for you.

I read this book twice because there is so much good information and ideas in it that it was hard to wrap my head around the first time. Coming back to the book a few weeks later really made it hit home for me that gardening in your front yard is a community affair, as it should be.

I really enjoyed this book and will likely read it again in the next few weeks as I put H.C. Flore's ideas into motion and need a little pep rally to keep up the hard and rewarding work.

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Overly idealistic, but interesting for what it is

There's a tendency among activists these days to see their focus as the solution to all the world's problems. For one author, feminism envelopes all issues; for another communism (or capitalism) does. For others, it's Christianity.
As an avid, beginning gardener, I understand the appeal, but I feel like the connection between world peace and gardening wasn't adequately argued in the book. Having scrounged myself a piece of a neighbor's yard, I expected that this would be a good book to get me started on a practical bent. However, I found that the idealism often prevented extensive practical advice which is necessary for the beginner. Perhaps advanced gardeners can "make space for all plant species" and can't recommend one species above another, but there was limited - almost non-existent - acknowledgment that some species are easier to grow than others, and some are more useful in terms of food production, especially if space is extremely limited. For a first "food" garden, would I be better off growing potatoes? Tomatoes? Spinach?
I found the transition from garden-related activism to community activism quite rocky. I wish the sections on seed-saving and connecting with neighbors were expanded. On a personal level, I found many of the asides (which I will paraphrase as "well, *of course* all right-minded people agree that ____________") were off-putting, as hard-core radical leftists are not the only ones who are interested in producing clean, local food and making communities. I was also troubled by the exhortations to get rid of appliances, go vegetarian, and dumpster scavenge to save the environment, while at the same time suggesting extensive driving (to farms, to dumpsters, around town, between bakeries).
All that aside, Food Not Lawns is an interesting read. It's a bit like reading a brainstorming session, which politics and communication and personal stories and food info is interspersed. It is clear the author is passionate about her subject, and believes in the process. In a sense, it is a very second-wave book - before the post-post modern doubts and hyper self-awareness. It's refreshing, and combined with sources of practical horticultural information, would be a good read for any radical gardener.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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