Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times

Mother Earth News Wiser Living #5

by Steve Solomon

“Shows us how to garden like our ancestors gardened . . . with just four basic hand tools, and with little or no electricity or irrigation.” ―Carol Deppe, author of The Resilient Gardener In hard times, the family can be greatly helped by growing a highly productive food garden, requiring little cash outlay or watering. This book shows that any family with access to 3-5,000 sq. ft. of garden land can halve their food costs using a growing system requiring just the odd bucketful of household wastewater, perhaps two hundred dollars’ worth of hand tools. Gardening When It Counts helps readers rediscover traditional low-input gardening methods to produce healthy food. Currently popular intensive vegetable gardening methods are largely inappropriate to the new circumstances we find ourselves in. Crowded raised beds require high inputs of water, fertility and organic matter, and demand large amounts of human time and effort. Prior to the 1970s, North American home food growing used more land with less labor, with wider plant spacing, with less or no irrigation, and all done with sharp hand tools. But these sustainable systems have been largely forgotten. Designed for readers with no experience and applicable to most areas in the English-speaking world except the tropics and hot deserts, Gardening When It Counts is inspiring increasing numbers of North Americans to achieve some measure of backyard food self-sufficiency. “Delightfully informative and abundantly rich with humor and grandfatherly wisdom. A must-read for anyone wanting a feast off the land of their own making.” ―Elaine Smitha, host of the “Evolving Ideas” cable talk show and author of If You Make the Rules, How Come You’re Not Boss?

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction, Food, Agriculture, Survival, How To, Sustainability

360 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2006

About the author

Steve Solomon is the founder of the Territorial Seed Company. He has been growing most of his family's food for over 35 years, and is the author of several landmark gardening books. A lifelong evangelist for the value of self-sufficiency, his writing, lectures and classes are focused on helping people become financially independent through producing their own necessities. He currently homesteads in Tasmania.

Reviews

[Lost Planet Airman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense, textbook-level knowledge (hard-won by the author as he cheerfully tells us) on growing vegetables for max nutrition and quality. Mr. Solomon is thorough and smart, but he is the "Anti-Square Foot" gardener, advocating starting far more seeds than you can support, and thinning to a wide spacing for healthy, "self=reliant" plants. Has a great chapter on fertilization and manure, and another on tools. He provides several pages on each major plant, in order from simplest-to-grow to most challenging.

Completes TBR Challenge #1, read the 56th book on your TBR shelf.

[Jill · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, and I REALLY did not. I can't even finish it. It's been years of limping through it. This book sucks ALL the joy out of gardening. All of it. Unless you actually make it to the torturous end and get some food. This man analyzes everything to the nth degree -- down to things like the result of different pressures of different watering systems and the result on the dirt and exact distances for growing things and exact formulas for fertilizer and dirt and how to do it yourself and on the cheap by buying pounds of various things from places I don't think I even have access to and making it yourself... Just overwhelming and depressing. Maybe this would be the book for me if I didn't have anything else to do with my time and I was gardening strictly for feeding myself and a bunch of other people. THANK THE LORD that I am not in that situation. I would cry. The one benefit of reading the book is that I have decided that it probably really isn't worth my time to save seeds, unless I really want to try it. And, that I probably can't put too much coffee grounds in my garden.

[Scottsdale Public Library]

With the price of everything from gas to food constantly increasing, saving a few dollars can make a big difference.
More and more people are finding that they can grow food themselves and Gardening When It Counts gives you the information to produce food in everything from a roof garden to a 5,000 square foot plot of land. –Michael S.-

[Kat Heatherington · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book, full of deeply useful gardening advice. Very, very well-written. A couple major flaws: his bias towards water-rich bioregions is a real problem for a reader living in the desert southwest, which is a bioregion this author appears to have never even heard of, from the way he talks. (He mentions the "low desert states" once, but apparently nobody ever mentioned to him that ENORMOUS chunks of NM, and AZ, and some portions of NV and CA, are above 5000 ft elevation.) Consequently, he gives advice about watering systems that is ONLY useful if you live in a place that gets more than 30 inches of rainfall a year, and which is below 3000 ft elevation. He also reccomends adding gypsum to your soil; if you live in a high-desert region with high calcium content in your heavy clay soil, you should check with your County Extension Office before doing any such thing.

That said, this guy's lifetime of gardening and lively, personable writing style boils down to the best gardening book i've ever read. He's clear, concise, explains himself well, and only reccomends practices that he himself uses.

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the perfect counterpoint to John Jeavons' How to Grow More Vegetables. Solomon debunks the Grow Biointensive method as requiring too much investment of time, labor, water, and amendments for too little gain. A former seed man with experience in biointensive gardening, Solomon takes us to the gardens of our great-grandparents and shows us *why* they planted the way they did. His method requires more land per plant than Jeavons' method, but it's because the plants themselves require it by their very nature. You may not grow a hundred vegetables in a square foot using this, but the ones you do grow will be bigger, stronger, healthier, and more nutritious.

If for no other reason, buy this book just to have Solomon's formula for homemade organic fertilizer on hand. It's a dust you spread like chemical fertilizers, but totally organic and hard to screw up. This book has fed my stomach as well as my mind.

[Cameron · Rating 2 out of 5]

Written by a cranky old man with a serious superiority complex, this book comes off as unfriendly and elitist. Gardeners who don't subscribe to his techniques are obviously rank amateurs with no hope of success, and he refers to them as "Everyone Else." If you can ignore this old codgers teaching style, you may be able to glean a few useful facts, especially his recipe for complete organic fertilizer (COF) and the importance of soil amendments. I had many questions answered by this book, but I really wish it had been written by someone else.

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine you’re at a party. Someone tells you that guy in the corner has a marvelous vegetable garden, and makes you an introduction. You tell him you’re thinking of starting a garden to cut down on your grocery bills. Next thing you know you’ve been neatly buttonholed and the rest of the party is you standing in place listening to tales of seed producer corruption, the best mixes of dead fish and bat guano, plow pan, how to sharpen a shovel, and how composting is actually very hard. At first you’re looking for an exit, but then you get kinda into it and just listen to his stories. In the spring you take none of his advice and do 4 uninteresting tomatoes in pots.

That is this book.

[Missy LeBlanc Ivey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Purchased years ago, around 2006 or so. I found this gardening book very informative, although maybe not so self-sufficient if you are trying to grow a garden with no money...you know..."Growing Food in Hard Times" like the title suggests. My attempt at gardening always costs me an arm and a leg every single year; and I'm never really that successful. How exhausting! But, here is where I learned about plow pan. If you continue to plow your garden with a rototiller, you will get hardpan dirt just underneath where the tiller tines turn. I "tried" not to till, but because I get no help in the garden, shoveling really is just too damn hard. Period. So, tilling it is. I have all the pertinent, important stuff I want to remember from this book underlined. So, it's definitely a keeper.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is extremely pragmatic and not influenced by garden centers, seed companies, politically correctness and conventional wisdom. A very interesting and informative book.

other people talk about his methods

http://livinglowinthelou.blogspot.com...

http://www.waldeneffect.org/blog/Stev...

[else fine · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extremely useful book, full of information on how to get maximum nutrition at minimum cost from your vegetable garden. Detailed without being confusing or overly technical. He's got great advice on tools, water-saving techniques, and seed varieties.

[Ian Reynard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Certainly a useful book, and one I will need to get my own copy of. It is clearly and compellingly written, and Solomon's ideas and methods are well-reasoned, and I especially like his dry-gardening and low-irrigation, low-labor approach, and appreciate the care he puts into suggesting ways to save money and work, and always showing "OK, better, best" tiers for the reader to be able to use this information based on their own available resources and local conditions. My one major caveat is that Solomon tends to be quite rigid about his preferred methods and what he thinks is important, sometimes to the exclusion of other valuable ideas and advances in plant and soil science since the mid-20th century. Particularly, soil ecology is mostly lost on him, at least as of this 2005 book. As someone who is often accused of rigidity, not to say curmudgeonliness, myself, I find Solomon a delight to read and an almost inexhaustible source of knowledge and experience, as well as strong opinions. His isn't the /only/ way of gardening intelligently, but of course it isn't. This is however an invaluable book for anyone gardening in order to produce a meaningful quantity of high-quality food, especially for those of us who are poor.

[Anie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll admit that I haven't used this as a gardening bible yet, for obvious reasons -- I'm reviewing this right after reading it. That being said, there's a beautiful mix of common sense (crowding plants stresses them) and grounded scientific knowledge (plants get stressed when their root systems crowd and they compete for water and nutrients while also potentially dealing with the excretions of other plants). It's easy to use as a reference, and generally very clear while still having plenty of nuance.

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a super easy read, but it is important. I reckon I’ll have to read it every winter for a few years before I internalize all of the information.

[Ali O'Hara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well really I rated this three stars, because I don't have much positive or negative feedback on this book.

He disagrees with a lot of gardening advice especially sheet mulching and intensive gardening. I don't know, that seems to work well for many. He did have a good point about cross-pollination in intensive gardening, but I think the gardener should decide whether or not that bothers them, and/or how to deal with it.

Anyways, I'm a really lazy gardener. I like sheet mulching, or my version of it, because its easy. I put stuff in the ground, and water a little when needed, and if it works, yay, if not, it wasn't meant to be. This was just -- like most gardening books -- more thought and detail than I care to put in it.

Yes I know, but what if I need to feed myself from my garden in the end of times?????

Well silly, that's why I practice now.

OK, but really, there were some interesting parts on transplants and seedlings I may revisit come spring, or rather, late winter here in Seattle.

[Miriam Axel-lute]

So far, this book is equal parts inspiring and frustrating. Since one of his main goals is to get gardeners to space things out more, allowing them to water less, and I'm an urban gardener with no choice to add another half-acre of lawn to my garden we're off to an awkward start. And he's a little harsh about his fallen mentors in intensive gardening and a little egotistical about his own fertilizer recipe.

Nonetheless, he clearly knows his stuff, and his explanations of everything from selecting transplants to understanding seed saving (and when to buy seed instead) to sharpening your tools (different angles for spades and hoes, yo!) are detailed and useful and fascinating. If you want to really answer questions like "How much water is enough?" he'll help you. I will be glad to have this on my shelf as I keep learning to garden. If I even need to start from scratch somewhere with space and get a really big yield, it will be indispensible.

[Leslie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I suppose this book gave a little bit of helpful advice that I haven't read in other places. His technique involves working mostly organically, which I liked and he had some good ideas on how to maintain plants with a minimal amount of watering, which is useful in Texas where it doesn't rain that often. What didn't help was that this was for exponentially larger areas of growing than I will ever have access to.

The author is an older man that has been growing plants and selling seeds for a very long time. He knows what he's doing, but overall, I didn't find it to be overly helpful and think there are better books out there for newbie gardeners that live in the suburbs.

I skipped a fair amount of sections - mostly about collecting your own seeds, veggies I have no intention of growing and how to make compost on such a large scale it would take up most of my back yard. Something tells me the HOA wouldn't approve.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good. Steve presents himself as that straight from the hip, grandpa farmer you never had with a helping of crotechy old man who delights in telling you not to do what everyone is selling you on. His ideas about spacing bears up in my limited experience. My second year of gardening I spaced things way closer and had horrible yields compared to my first year when I had only planted a couple of things.
His explanation on composting was the best ever. I've read tons of books and articles on composting and I still learned a lot from his chapter on composting. He mentioned having written an entire book on composting that I will have to look up.
His main thesis is anti-intensive gardening and more focused on how to grow abundant healthy vegetables when you don't have the inputs, including city water, that are available in our oil based society, which may be the norm as oil becomes scarce.
This is definitely one I will keep on the gardening shelf.

[Ustaaza T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a deliberately contrarian book from an experienced gardener, businessman, and author. It was recommended to me as an opposition to Jeavons' and others' theories of intensive gardening. I was fascinated by the points Solomon made about the effect of climate and rainfall on the planning and the importance of buying commercial seed instead of saving it, where at all possible. He also gives specific recommendations for seed suppliers he trusts in the various climate zones, and helps the reader to understand why they may have been having problems with growing from seed in the past (Hint: it's not the home grower, it's the seed that's often the problem).

I borrowed this book from a friend (not the same one who had recommended it) and now I'm going to get my own copy. It adds a useful insight to the 30 or so garden books I already have.

[bruin · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love a book about food growing and sustainability that blows most of what i know and have been taught completely out of the water. i feel like solomon is actually putting food growing/urban gardening in the context of rapidly declining fertility and imminent lack of access to water. he goes back to what our grandparents and greatparents did when they grew food and put it in context. super important. super relevant. and super smart, albeit a little sassy at times.

a bit complicated also in the requirement of a vast track of land, but what i took this to mean, is that if you have a postage stamp, don't grow 10 tomatoes, consider growing 1 or 2 and conceivably your yield would be comparable. i want more plant nerds to read this with me and talk about it!

[Cheree Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished the book Gardening When It Counts by Steve Soloman. Soloman takes a slightly different approach to gardening that other books I have read. His focus is more on how to get the most out of your garden with less work. He takes inspiration from the early Native Americans and how they grew their gardens without the use of extensive irrigation that we have available to us today. He also goes into great detail about how to give your plants lots of room to grow and how to create your own fertilizers and compost. This is a book I plan to purchase and use as a resource when I actually begin my garden

Read entire review here.

[Dean Wangerin · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a newbie gardener, I liked this book because it has such a scientific bent. It's not a textbook, but it's clearly written by someone who is both experienced in the field, and has a deep understanding of the chemistry & biology of gardening. So many books tell you what to do; it's nice when someone explains why.

I made my own Complete Organic Fertilizer, following the book's instruction. It was an adventure, but I finally stumbled across the Hugo Feed Mill, which sells the bulk agricultural products that are called for. But, it's much more fun to make your own fertilizer than to just buy a bag of it at Home Depot. And, thanks to the fertilizer, my tomatoes are now doing great. (well, they were ravaged by the deer a few days ago, but otherwise they're about as healthy as can be.)

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a lot of good information in this book, but the thing it really drove home for me was the fact that you can't make something out of nothing. That is, compost made from nutritionally deficient materials will still be nutritionally deficient. It's interesting that many of the agriculture books I've read lately have really hammered on the need to add minerals to deficient soil.

The other extremely useful section of this book was the section on choosing, maintaining, and using the basic hand tools of shovel, hoe, and rake. It's amazing how much easier it is to use a shovel when it has been sharpened.

[Richard May · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book! I know nothing of gardening and Solomon clearly explains traditional gardening strategies for those of us whose only gardening experience is seeing our grandparents do it.

After reading the book I feel confident in my 'book knowledge' that I am willing to try out gardening myself.

Particularly, I enjoyed his opinions on organic versus fertilizer methods. Solomon is critical of both methods and address his critiques clearly. He provides solutions for the short comings of both.

In the end I felt like I had learned enough to make decisions about how to garden rather than simply follow 'Everybody Else's' instructions.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whew - this book kinda blew much of what I thought I knew out of the water. For example, Mr. Solomon really does not believe in sheet mulching (where you prepare your beds by creating a lasagna-like situation out of layers of straw, manure, etc.) He debunks lots of popular ideas - about watering, how much space to give your plants, how to plant seed, how to fertilize, etc.

One criticism - his ways do demand a lot of land. And some sections were intimidating to me (measuring water flow rates and composting, for example) - but definitely seems like a good book to have on one's bookshelf.

[Gregj · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have room for a large garden, this book is for you. Plenty of room between plants provide for more productivity and less water demand contends the author, who backs up this assertion with illustrations of various vegetables roots structure which prove his point. Many other interesting and useful advice including "chiting" and how to save seed. I will be following his advice in my garden next year. Be warned, a lot of the information in this book will go against the trend of intensive planting methods that are so popular lately.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best gardening books I've read in a long time. Be warned --- it's not really suited to the suburban backyard gardener, which is why I liked it so much. Instead Solomon writes about how to grow your own food the most efficiently, explaining why some intensive gardening strategies don't make sense.

Read the highlights of Gardening When It Counts on my blog.

[Donnita Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This author's attitute is somewhat offensive and elitest. However, the information in this book is gold. I live in a very dry desert area but believe his techniques can be adapted to produce better results than intensive gardening techniques I'm currently attempting. I'll be adding this book to my library.

[John]

I enjoyed this book, but hesitate to rate it on the basis that I do not have the space to put it into practice.

Highlights:
* Space your plants further apart than you think you need to (with extensive tables) / against intensive raised-bed gardening
* Sharpen your shovel
* Complete Organic Fertilizer recipe
* Against both garden center transplants and garden center seed packets
* Differing incentives between commercial growers and home gardeners (eg commercial growers want crops to mature all at the same date, while home gardeners prefer things that have variability in maturation date so that they can harvest and eat it over time)
* What we think of now as heirloom crops were actually just the commercial varieties from before the '50s - proper heirloom crops from before the Industrial Revolution started selecting for shelf stability and appeal are pretty much impossible to find.
* Math to figure out how much water your soil loses per day, and therefore how much and how often you need to water it
* The importance of carbon/nitrogen ratios in compost and the effects of different C/N ratios on short-term plant growth and long-term soil health
* Viewing composting as a fermentation process - have a starter culture of good live dirt (esp. from last year's compost heap), don't let it get too hot (otherwise the nitrogen cooks out as ammonia, your biome dies, and things don't decompose fully)
* Don't worry too much about most diseases and pests within a single growing season; rely on pests to help thin weak crops, and create growing conditions where the strong crops outgrow the pest (and then rotate crops).
* The virtues of kale and potatoes; the difficulties of onions and celery
* Extensive bibliography

I find myself a lot more worried about the diversity of our seedstock, on civilization-scale, than I was before.

I think I have a couple of small complaints. In certain places the text felt a bit disorganized; I recall being confused several times when I would reach a heading and not be sure why it was in this chapter or what led it to follow the topic before it. Another minor organizational quibble is that I think he referenced C/N ratio on a fertilizers table long before talking about what it meant in the composting chapter - I recall finding that table confusing initially.

I would've liked more clarity on the sprinkler math and tables; inches/foot is not an intuitive unit for the novice audience that his introduction suggests he's aiming at.

Finally, I think this really could've benefited from a conclusion with a worked example (or three) putting it all together. Here's a hypothetical Joe Greenhorn with a quarter acre suburban lot in such-and-such climate; he does the soil test from Chapter whatever and gets these results, so he makes this decision, spends about howevermuch on tools, fertilizer, and seed, sets up this this many plots for these things in this pattern, sinks n hours per day on average over the course of the next y months, and gets something like these results. The next year (or season), here's what he changes.

[Lachlan Phillips · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not like this book. There were many interesting things along the way that I'd like to try, but it felt like he was talking down to me the whole way.

"Don't do this. It won't work." Usually he explains why, but the emphasis is on the "word of the guru".

Or perhaps another way to describe it is there is no fun in this book. There is no joy over inanimate seeds germinating, no beauty in flowers blooming. You grow food - good, maximally nutritious food - or you die.

I think part of it is that he has a single goal in mind, and wants to achieve it at all costs. If you want to grow perfect veggies without watering much and have a decent about of land, then this is probably the way to do it. Don't bother with veggies that are too hard, because you're (probably) going to fail.

If those aren't your conditions, you have to see past all the absolute statements and take the principles that suit you.

I also had so many questions he didn't answer. (Paraphrasing here):
- "Don't use mulch". Why not? "Because it'll harbour slugs and other pests like nothing else". Okay, fair enough, but what about permaculture principles that solve that problem by finding balance - habitat for predators?
- "Till your soil, and add all these mineral amendments in these particular ratios". The second half of that sounds cool, but what about the soil life? What if the reason you have to amend it so much is that you're looking it all? If I have poor soil, can I put amendments on the surface and let worms and co stir it on for me? What if I didn't till, and instead fed the mycelium networks... would the plants naturally find the right balance of nutrients
- "Put plants further apart to save water." Probably true in general, but what if you increase the soil organic matter (which it doesn't sound like his aim is) so that it holds water better? Would you still need such measures?

These were just some of the questions I had about things that were emphatically stated. He just didn't interact with other things I've read.

So, I don't know. I'll take some things onboard, and keep the rest in the back of my mind in case I find it relevant one day.

[Guilherme de Oliveira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclaimer: I haven't tested his techniques yet, but I got to the book through a youtube channel where several different gardening "gospels" are being tested side by side (RED gardens), and Solomon's advice seems to produce really good results in general.

This book is packed with good information, from growing habits, nutrient requirements and general difficulty of growing several vegetable crops, to instructions on how to make decent compost, to considerations on seed saving and where to buy seeds from (if you're in the US, Canada, UK or Australia).

The book is generally aimed at people with larger land areas for gardening (which restricts the usefulness to people with somewhat large plots available, something like 100m² upwards) but it is probably an interesting read even for urban gardens who won't be able to employ many of the techniques here described.

The single issue with Solomon's writing is preaching his techniques as The Way, and everybody with diverging methods as... wrong. It's clear that his approach was developed through years of testing and study, but it can sound a bit unpleasant.

I'll probably read some biointensive gardening book as a counterpoint, and test the approaches myself.