Customer Reviews

Getting Started In Permaculture: 50 Practical Projects to Build and Design Productive Gardens

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

After a brief discussion of what permaculture is and hopes to accomplish, the authors present 50 projects for your garden. Some of them are common garden structures and some are aimed at reusing tires and plastic soda bottles. Retaining wall, ponds, planting mounds from used tires. Waterers, slug traps for plastic bottles, newspaper planting pots. Making compost, liquid fetilizers, hot houses, cold frames, shade houses. A section on making paper, soap, and cleaners.

Not an indepth discussion of permaculture, but a basic get started projects book.

50 projects? Well maybe there are, but many are incomplete with quick once overs or include something of an eye sore like taking a tire and filling it with food and calling it a feed trough for chickens. Or how about stacking tires up to make flower beds, there's another project listed...

One project is organic pest control then mashes some bullets in then doesn't go into all the specific ingredients needed, amounts, and misc prep making an useless.

Each project should be numbered for easy reference, there are no chapters or groupings. Almost every page has bullet after bullet. Would help to have numbered bullets for directions and then bullets just for notes.

If you've read any other books on permaculture, you've probably hit on most of this. I am very disappointed with this book. You want a real book to start with? Check out Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison.

Rather than tackling the Designer's Manual or even Permaculture in a Nutshell, go to this little book for a great hands-on approach to what Permaculture is about. You'll be able to complete a few of the projects that afternoon.

If you want to skip all the theory (most of it) this is the perfect book for you. It gives you a lot of ideas to star now. I only give it three stars because after browsing through it you'll be left wanting more (maybe this is a good thing) and eventually go out and get another permaculture book. I recommend starting with Gaia's Garden instead, it gives you both theory (without being overwhelming) and practice in a much nicer presentation and depth.

I had originally bought this little handbook in hopes that it would be a cheap, quick and useful read I could recommend to homeowners after I install environmentally-friendly landscaping. However, there is better information, more easily found, on the internet than in this book. A large fraction of it consists of one-liner blurbs about how to make just about everything you never needed out of old tires or soft drink bottles (what permaculture practitioner has that many soda bottles sitting around?). The rest is, generally, too short and vague--and occasionally too silly--to be useful. (Hand-made paper? Really? That's the most detailed recycling project procedure you have to ramble about? My fifth-grade art teacher taught it better.) Their tree-planting advice, in particular, is bad in almost every respect--almost every step they advise has been shown by research over the past century--that's right, some of it is a century out of date--to be useless at best, and more often downright counterproductive. For heaven's sake, if you don't know any better than this, check Edible Forest Gardens, Volume Two, out from the library before you start planting. Better yet, buy it--you'll more than make up the price in savings if you ever try to plant more than a few trees or shrubs. The instructions for such permaculture mainstays as sheet mulching and circle beds were vague enough to be equally useless, if not actively encouraging bad practices.
I admit, there were a few ideas I did walk away thinking about--some of their homemade herbal pesticide sprays, for instance, but they say nothing about whether any of their preparations can be used on plants that will be eaten, or if so, how long one should wait before eating them. Basically, before I use anything out of this book, I'm going to have to go elsewhere to research it, make sure it's okay advice, and find out all the missing details.

As I'm now starting in the permaculture, I really wanted a book that is practical, and gives you suggestions that could be useful and also easy to do. This book was the best! I was able put the principles in practice as I opened the book, simple but very effective information. Out of all the permaculture books that I have this one has been easy to use and with little skills and know how you could effectively put these tools to use. If you're looking for a book to get you started this is the one to buy.

Quick read. Well written. Simple but good illustrations. Very practical guide with hands on projects to get started using permaculture design principles.

This is an excellent very thin book. Great start but I expected there to be more!

Absolutely a wonderful and informative book. Easy to read and apply. The only difficulty I had was that measurements were in metric, but easily converted. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in getting a start in permaculture. The projects are practical and explained down to the last detail - including pictures and suggested materials. A MUST BUY!

I know both Ross and Jenny Mars. He was the first person in Western Australia, AU to get an advanced degree in Permaculture. They are extremely nice and very knowledgeable. Great information in all their books. I highly recommend anything they write.

Barb Worth
USA