Customer Reviews

Growing Green: Animal-Free Organic Techniques

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Growing Green was written by Jenny Hall and Iain Tolhurst of the Vegan Organic Network, an international group concerned with local, organic growing. This book is on the leading edge of truly sustainable and responsible agriculture that is quickly finding its way around the world. The vegan organic method not only avoids using synthetic nutrients, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides but also avoids bringing animal manures, blood, bones, feathers and fish parts onto the farm. Fertility is maintained with nitrogen-fixing legumes and other nutrient-concentrating plants and plant-based composts which to the greatest extent possible come from the same farm.

The Vegan Organic Network has lead the world in developing third party verified vegan organic growing standards in the United Kingdom and has recently brought this program to North America through Quality Certification Services. The farm that this writer operates is proud to be certified under these standards.

The authors take the vegan organic (known in the UK as Stockfree Organic Standards)and break them down to the basics that novice or seasoned grower can easily follow to implement these highly efficient and ethical techniques.

If you are not able to grow your own at the moment, seek out and support your local growers, and if they are not growing vegan organically, encourage them to do so! For more information on this revolutionary approach to agriculture, check out Vegan-Organic Network at [...].

In this book you will learn what I will call - true organic agriculture and/or gardening .... and what the application of the concepts presented can achieve. Simply this - when what you do does not merely aim to substitute acceptable inputs for prohibited ones - but, what happens when a complete conversion occurs. Jenny Hall and Iain Tolhurst give us concepts that are directly applicable to most any scale of operation - from the back-yard-gardener to the full-scale-production-farmer. To quote Tim Deane in the Forward to the book - "Where the production of food is seen as a continuum, as a means of survival in balance with the ecosystem that sustains our lives."

The Stockfree-Organic Growers and Farmers Mission Statement is at the forefront of the concepts presented and if as an effective reader you take and apply each and every one of the concepts presented with an open and practical mind you will be totally transfixed and converted - believe me ---- I started out as a skeptic and now I am a convert = it all really does work and it is so much easier and less expensive and the rewards financial and personal are much-much greater.

The foundation of GROWING GREEN: ANIMAL-FREE ORGANIC TECHNIQUES is the concept of stockfree organic growing which includes nothing from animals - and the concurrent idea that when growers abandon the use of manures, chemicals and genetic modifications, only then will they see healthier crops and fewer problems. GROWING GREEN also shows that anyone can make a living growing such organics, providing chapters packed with guidelines on how to follow organic practices at different scales of vegetable production. From assessing and improving soil fertility and understanding composting procedures to rotating crops and considering environment impact, GROWING GREEN is especially recommended for college-level agricultural holdings.