Eat More Dirt: Diverting and Instructive Tips for Growing and Tending an Organic Garden - Softcover

Sandbeck, Ellen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0767909208 ISBN 13: 9780767909204

Publisher: Broadway Books, 2003

Synopsis

A witty, whimsical gardening primer for anyone who wants to tend their patch of earth with a truly green thumb.

A garden can either bring you bliss or drive you insane, but organic landscape gardener Ellen Sandbeck has spent a lifetime discovering creative, effective techniques for growing and tending a garden with ease—while being kind to the earth itself. Eat More Dirt is her delightful compendium of homespun tips and tricks for designing, planting, nurturing, and beautifying your land without the use of harmful chemicals and pesticides.

From peat moss to irksome pests and predators, Sandbeck explores the lively world of compost heaps (which can be used to naturally “vaccinate” your garden against disease), growing good soil, choosing plants well-adapted to your climate, weed warfare, planting protocols, and eco-friendly ways to quench your garden’s thirst. Whether you tend an acre or just a window box, Eat More Dirt is an essential guide to keeping your garden thriving, the natural way.
· Build up topsoil without toxic fertilizers or noisy machinery · Compost, the other black gold
· Eradicate weeds with sunflower seeds · Protect berries from birds with a sugar-water spray
· Gentle pruning techniques · Banish beetles with wheat bran · Drive off furry pests with cayenne pepper
· When life hands you a seep, dig a pond—transforming garden irritants into garden pearls
· Pre- and post-gardening stretches · Dancing with tools · The Zen of puttering ·

About this title

About the Author

Ellen Sandbeck is the author of Slug Bread and Beheaded Thistles: Amusing and Useful Techniques for Nontoxic Housekeeping and Gardening. A landscape gardener and graphic designer, she lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

From Publishers Weekly

For anyone who loved Slug Bread & Beheaded Thistles, Sandbeck's terrific guide to "nontoxic" home care and gardening, this guide to organic gardening will seem the perfect follow-up. A Duluth, Minn. based landscape gardener, Sandbeck remains just as thoughtfully practical about sustainable practices as ever, but browsers who pick up this book (or Thistles) for the first time will be struck foremost with its beautiful design (Sandbeck is also a graphic designer), which strikes an uncanny balance between archaic and modern elements. The fonts recall late 19th century pre-Raphaelite floridity without being florid, while the silhouette-style illustrations and icons used throughout are less decorative than integral to explaining techniques and even gardening postures. Chapters on soil health, balance in design, knowledge of differing plant needs, tools and pests ("Learning from Your Enemies") are concise and commonsensical, while those on "Gardening as Exercise" and "The Meditative Gardener" cover physical and spiritual ground directly, and without goading or sentimentality. Sandbeck offers just the right amounts of encouragement, healthy skepticism and experience; this book will be a favorite of experienced gardeners and novices alike.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadway Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0767909208
• ISBN 13: 9780767909204
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208