Coming soon

Dear readers, 

I’m pleased to announce that my book The Sustainable-Enough Garden will be published early next year. I can’t wait to share it with you.

     The book tells the story of my journey toward sustainable gardening. It started with compost. When I started my first compost pile, I imagined I was going to make fallen leaves into rich, black compost in just one season. Like a lot of other gardening skills, composting turned out to be a lot more complicated than I expected, but when I got the knack, it involved doing less rather than more.

    Gradually I learned to garden, partly by reading and taking classes, partly by trial and error. I wanted to bring my gardening practices in line with my environmental principles. I thought I was doing pretty well. 

Sweet alyssum for pollinators, with a volunteer mullein

     Then in 2010 I got a reality check when I read Douglas Tallamy’s book Bringing Nature Home, with its account of a crisis for native insects that need particular native plants for food, shelter, and reproduction. Inspired to be part of the solution, I took another look at my gardening practices, including plant choices, to see how I could make them more sustainable. I’ve spent the last five years working on this and writing about it.

Offering nectar for bees

     Is my garden completely sustainable now? No, but I'm getting closer. I wrote the book to describe the realistic middle path I’ve charted between conventional gardening practices and purist edicts that don’t fit the busy lives of many home gardeners.

    A wonderful book designer, Barb Cottingham, is at work now making the book attractive and inviting. Next it will go to the indexer, and then it will be published by Amazon CreateSpace, which will produce copies on demand, probably starting late this winter. I’ll let you know as soon as Amazon is ready to start taking orders.

    Thank you for reading my blog. I hope you’ll enjoy the book as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. See you in 2016.