Adaptation agriculture: How to grow food when you can't buy seeds, fertilizers, or pesticides.

Bringing dynamic back into vegetable gardening, seed saving, and breeding of plants and animals. A joyful and accessible approach to growing tasty, productive, and resiliently diverse food.

Advocating a return to traditional regenerative horticulture methods of gardening and farming, while minimizing the use of industrialized methods. Focusing on communities, and local varieties of crops and animals. Biodiversity and cross pollination allow selection for crops that thrive under ever changing conditions, lessening the need for costly inputs, like poisons, fertilizer, materials, and labor. Less labor means more time for friends, family, music, dancing, and joy.

The book includes detailed suggestions for developing a more reliable food system using local crop varieties. The techniques taught in this book can bring self-reliance and sustainable food security to small scale back yard beginner gardens, large scale farms, and permaculture food forests.

A chapter discusses pollination and the benefits of encouraging cross-pollination.

Chapters deal with breeding tomatoes, corn, beans, squash, and grains. Includes tips on growing many other vegetable varieties. The appendix includes a summary of which vegetables and grains work easiest with landrace gardening.

One chapter extends the principles of local gardening to breeding chickens, honeybees, mushrooms, and trees.

Reviews

“The best part is that everything in this book is adaptable for any gardener.” Jere Gettle, founder Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co., North America’s largest heirloom seed company.

“Landrace Gardening is brilliant.” Dan Barber, James Beard Foundation top chef in America in 2009. Row 7 Seed Company

"Under the same condition he was once gifted a guitar, Joseph offers us Abundance for as long as we keep learning to play within it." Heron Breen, Fedco Seeds, Organic Seed Alliance board member

“Landrace Gardening gives us a roadmap to the kind of joyful food security that we need for healing many of the most important wounds of our time.” Jason Padvorac. Padvorac Farm

“The western sustainable agriculture movement has long needed its own version of the 'One Straw Revolution'. Joseph Lofthouse provides just that. ” Alan Bishop, Alchemist at Spirits Of French Lick

“Awesome to see this process beginning to work in just one year.” Josh Jamison, HEART Village

“This book begins to spark the imagination to the possibilities of what we have lost and how to begin to resurrect the return to something even better.” Karin Kee

“Man is way too eager to take extra burdens upon his shoulders, babying and pampering the plant when it should be bred to do all the work itself. Landrace Gardening makes important progress in that direction.” Dave Blanchard

“No Homestead Or Garden Is Complete Without This Book!” Emsy Doodle

“If one can learn to take a more free approach to gardening and seed saving you will experience much of the joy Joseph receives when he gardens.” Andrew Barney

About the Author

Joseph adopted the principles landrace gardening in response to the harsh growing conditions in a high-altitude, short-season, desert garden. Instead of relying on expensive poisons, labor, and materials to coddle the plants, he encourages genetic diversity, cross-pollination, and survival of the fittest, allowing the plants to adapt themselves to the current and ever-changing ecosystem, thus simplifying gardening and seed saving. Joseph loves eating, farming, swimming, hot-springs, sunbathing, bird-watching, running, yoga, leggings, kilts, playing guitar, singing, and living habitually barefoot.

Click on Look-Inside to get a look at the table of contents, and first few chapters.