Slow Gardening

by Rushing, Felder

• ISBN13: 9781603582674
• ISBN10: 1603582673
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-06-27
• Publisher: Chelsea Green Pub Co

Summary

Doing something slowly means savoring what you do. However, in just a few generations, we've gone from eating mostly home-cooked food and gardening with mostly local resources to a fast-food culture and cookie-cutter "mow-and-blow" landscapes filled with unproductive and high-maintenance plants from afar. Sure, we've shed a lot of the menial labor it takes to put both food on the table and flowers in the garden, but at what cost to the Earth, and our own bodies? Slow Gardeningto the rescue! The name was inspired by Slow Food, an international movement that promotes local food systems and biological and cultural diversity. In much the same way, a slow-gardening approach can help us all appreciate and enjoy our gardens more, year in and year out. Slow doesn't mean simple or lazy. In fact, it can actually involve more work, just spread out over time, and in a leisurely fashion. Well-known Southern gardener Felder Rushing offers a commonsense, friendly, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other approach that will appeal to gardeners no matter where they live.Slow Gardening,is more than a bunch of tips for easy gardening; it's more about thinking "long haul" and "taking it easy." Life has lots of pressures-why include them in the garden?

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. vii
Preface and Acknowledgments	p. ix
An Introduction to Slow Gardening	p. 1
Garden Psychology	p. 15
Carving Out Your Space	p. 35
Plants-The Real Deal	p. 67
Nuts and Bolts: Universal Garden Practices	p. 117
Getting Slow in the Garden	p. 165
Index	p. 219
About the Author	p. 221
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Felder's enjoyment-based approach, which is what I do and teach but didn't have a name for til now, is sustainable gardening at its most enjoyable-without the usual anxiety over doing something wrong.--Susan Harris, cofounder, GardenRantand founder, Sustainable-Gardening