Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsDouble-digging, maybe. Double pages, no.
Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2000
This title grew from a 1971 experimental garden in Palo Alto, California instigated by Alan Chadwick and Stephen Kafka. That garden showed that using the biodynamic/French Intensive method produced four times more vegetables than conventional techniques.
Biodynamic techniques were developed by Austrian genius Rudolf Steiner. French Intensive methods were developed in the 1890s by market gardeners outside Paris, a time when horses provided more-than-ample fertilizer and the city provided a ready market for vegetables. Chadwick studied under Steiner and French gardeners.
The method requires double-digging garden beds and adding compost or aged manure. Double-digging to two feet in depth provides loose soil that roots easily penetrate. Plants are seeded or transplanted very close together and form a living mulch, shading roots, causing greater water retention, denying sunlight to weeds. Other aspects of the method are planting and transplanting by the phases of the moon and daily sprinkling rather than periodical flooding.
This material has been recycled four times since the 1974 typewritten edition. I regret to report it is no longer up-to-date gardening knowledge, it will intimidate beginning gardeners, and it will bore experienced gardeners. There is only one new chapter, titled Sustainability, which is mostly promotion of Ecology Action. In addition, Jeavons seems confused. In the first four editions he wrote that he was teaching us the "biodynamic/French intensive method" of Steiner and French gardeners as learned and taught by Chadwick. Now in a chapter titled A Perspective for the Future, he writes that his work is based on the "Chinese Biointensive way of farming." Yet nowhere does he advocate or tell how to use humanure, which is the basis of Chinese food production, as first shown by F.H. King in his book, Farmers of Forty Centuries. Only in the bibliography do we find book listings under the heading: Human Waste. The huge bibliography (36 pages, was 22 pages in the last edition) apparently lists every book and catalog in the Ecology Action library but there is NO INDEX! I find the lack of an index in a nonfiction book to be unforgivable. For instance, looking for crop rotation or mulching methods means scanning the entire 201 pages--and coming up empty.
There are pages and pages of drawings and technical charts that most readers will never use. We find listings of plants and information both barely usable--seeds per ounce, pounds consumed per average person per year--and important--bed spacing, yields--although there is no recognition or advice concerning the many soil types and growing zones. One is dismayed to find--in a book titled How to Grow More Vegetables--more pages of charts about grain, protein source, vegetable oil crops; cover, organic matter, fodder crops; energy, fiber paper and other crops; tree and cane crops--20 pages in all, than about vegetable crops--8 pages.
Promotion of Ecology Action uses a fourteen-page chapter in addition to six more pages of self-promotion in the Sustainability chapter. If you want to support Jeavons' work, send a check to Ecology Action, or buy his book, The Sustainable Vegetable Garden, adapted from this book by co-author Carol Cox, which is smaller and less expensive and has all his best stuff without the wasted pages of charts, drawings and promotion, and it has an index! If you want current gardening information, read authors such as Eliot Coleman and Dick Raymond who are progressive and work with all garden designs, including the mulch method first popularized by Ruth Stout and now used by hundreds of my gardening friends across the country. Most of us have tried the double-dig method and have long since moved on. I recommend you not waste your time, except maybe once for new gardens, depending on soil conditions. Thereafter, use mulch, save your back and spend your time and energy on better pursuits.
