Sustainable Food Gardens

Dismantle your gardening myths. Grow a garden grounded in fact.

Edible landscaping pioneer Robert Kourik deftly guides the reader through the mysteries of growing plants, designing landscapes in temperate climates and suburbs, and using all-natural, sustainable methods to grow and maintain a healthy variety of plants.

Would you like to garden without digging, composting, buying fertilizers, spraying with pesticides, or lamenting low yields?

If so, Sustainable Food Gardens is the book you’ve been waiting for, with over 450 pages, 13 chapters, and 487 color photos, illustrations, charts, and graphs. Author Robert Kourik began his career in natural landscape design and maintenance in 1974 with one of the country's first sustainably oriented organic gardening businesses.

In Sustainable Food Gardens, you’ll learn to:

• Design your own “edible landscapes.”
• Use no-till techniques to preserve the integrity of your soil
• Adapt your growing space to fit into a wide range of USDA garden zones
• Review alternative ways to change “guilds’ (well-intended clusters of trees and shrubs jumbled together) to more effective and labor-saving plantings.
• Grow new kinds of beautiful and productive Victory gardens
• Plant Native American “Three-Sisters” gardens that actually work 
• Learn many myths about roots and what to do to help them thrive
• Attract many beneficial insects to your garden with strategic flower plantings

Here are some of the other topics covered in depth: 

• Rainwater catchment/cisterns.
• Hügelkulturs (do you really need to raise garden beds filled with rotten wood?).
• Options for better, faster ways to maximize and improve soil.
• “Dynamic accumulation”—a myth with some useful guidelines.
• Avoiding hours of tree-pruning and encouraging fruiting with a few dozen clothespins.
• Clever ways to install and simplify drip irrigation
• Using plants to lure good insects that prey upon pests.
• Promoting beneficial soil life.
• Adding food crops to a native-looking landscape.

In Sustainable Food Gardening, you’ll learn how to achieve that Holy Grail of gardening—productivity, tasty food, and a beautiful, sustainable garden, yard, or landscape.