At last, a great complement to Jeavons' book, How To Grow More Vegetables.
John Jeavons is a researcher, lecturer and author of several books on sustainable agricultural practices. In March of 2010, I had the pleasure of meeting him and he was kind enough to discuss his methods with me. That interview is posted to this web site for those interested in learning more about Biointensive farming.
I subsequently purchased John's book, "How to Grow More Vegetables" and it is now my gardening bible. John's methods are well documented therein and the book contains a detailed set of tables on various vegetable, cereal, fruit and nut crops that I highly recommend. The tables alone are worth the cost of the book. However, "How To Grow" contains relatively few illustrations and no photos whatsoever; in my opinion, this makes it less effective as a how-to resource.
Fortunately, Jeavons recently released a Grow Biointensive DVD that does a great job filling-in these gaps. The video runs for about an hour and 20 minutes and covers the following topics:
- Garden Bed & Soil
- Starting Seedlings
- Transplanting
- Composting
- Harvesting
- Saving Seeds
- Choosing Crops
- Maintaining Your Garden
Although this video is positioned as a "beginners guide," I think even seasoned gardeners will pick up a few tricks. I particularly liked the section on seed starting using wooded flats, and the portion of the video that illustrates a method of preparing the soil known as double digging. Since most suburban gardeners probably don't have any experience growing grains, I think they will be pleasantly surprised by the section of the video on that subject.
Below is one chapter of the video that will give you a sense for the depth and pacing of the overall DVD.
I give the "Grow Biointensive" DVD a big, green thumbs up. You can buy it and the How To Grow More Vegetables book at John's web site. The DVD is $20 and you can buy the bundled DVD and book for $30.
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