This Organic Life

by Gussow, Joan Dye

• ISBN13: 9781931498241
• ISBN10: 1931498245
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-10-01
• Publisher: Chelsea Green Pub Co

Summary

Joan Dye Gussow is an extraordinarily ordinary woman. She lives in a home not unlike the average home in a neighborhood that is, more or less, typically suburban. What sets her apart from the rest of us is that she thinks more deeply -- and in more eloquent detail -- about food. In sharing her ponderings, she sets a delightful example for those of us who seek the healthiest, most pleasurable lifestyle within an environment determined to propel us in the opposite direction. Joan is a suburbanite with a green thumb, but also a feisty, defiant spirit with a relentlessly positive outlook.

This Organic Life begins with Joan and her husband Alan's trials and tribulations growing vegetables for their own table while coping with careers and a sprawling Victorian house in Congers, New York. Motivated to go "off-the-grid" of the global food system in their later years, the Gussows find and fall in love with a dilapidated Odd Fellows Hall on the banks of the Hudson River. Joan's often hilarious accounts of the "renovation" of the "dream" (some would say "nightmare") hou

Table of Contents

List of Recipes	viii
Preface	ix
How It All Began	3	(13)
A New Place	16	(12)
Garden and House	28	(14)
A Riverside Garden	42	(17)
Building It	59	(18)
Giving Things Up	77	(17)
Put It in the Cellar	94	(15)
Gooseberries and the FBI	109	(19)
Friends Next Door	128	(13)
Gaining Ground	141	(12)
Varmints	153	(17)
Eating My Yard	170	(14)
Lessons from the Tomato	184	(16)
Is It Worth It?	200	(15)
What a Sacrifice?	215	(18)
Heat, Rats, and Despair	233	(14)
California and the Rest of Us	247	(15)
Bibliography	262	(3)
Index	265