Gaia’s Garden – Second Edition
Gaia’s Garden has been the best-selling permaculture book in the world for the last 7 years. The enlarged, updated 2nd edition is the winner of the 2011 Nautilus Gold Medal Award.
The first edition of Gaia’s Garden sparked the imagination of America’s home gardeners, introducing permaculture’s central message: Working with nature, not against her, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens. This extensively revised and expanded second edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban growers.
Selected Excerpts from Gaia’s Garden:
- Gaia’s Garden: Table of Contents
- How to Use Gaia’s Garden
- Introducing Gaia’s Garden
- The Gardener’s Feathered Friends
- The Three Sisters—or Is it Four?
- Using Natural Plant Communities to Guide Guild Design
- How To: The Ultimate, Bomb-Proof Sheet Mulch
Ecological gardening—which involves growing a wide range of edible and other useful plants—can be done on any scale. It’s fun and easy to create a “backyard ecosystem” by assembling communities of plants that can work cooperatively and perform a variety of functions, including:
- Building and maintaining soil fertility and structure
- Catching and conserving water in the landscape
- Providing habitat for beneficial insects, birds, and animals
- Growing an edible “forest” that yields seasonal fruits, nuts, and other foods
This revised and updated edition also features a new chapter on urban permaculture, designed for people in cities and suburbs with limited growing space. Whatever size yard or garden you have to work with, you can apply basic permaculture principles to make it more diverse, more natural, more productive, and more beautiful. Best of all, once it’s established, an ecological garden will reduce or eliminate most of the work that’s needed to maintain the typical lawn and garden.