The Key to Abundance: Polyculture Keyhole Gardens: Designs that Maximize your Vegetables and Minimize your Work

by Michael Hoag

179 pages, Paperback

Published November 28, 2024

Reviews

[Stephanie Lawton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been following Mike on social media for quite some time now and love his content. I've learned a lot from him. Which is why I was excited to read his latest book, but holy smokes, this is nothing short of a hot mess. It reads like a first draft with typos everywhere and lacking organization. Is there good content? Yes. And is it nice to have some of the things he teaches on socials written out? Also yes. There is so much potential here, but readers will have to commit to overlooking a frustrating and distracting amount of errors.

[Kaylee · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would give this higher stars for some of the content alone. It was exactly what I was hoping for, real diagram examples of keyhole garden beds and a summarized explanation of polyculture principles. However, I feel like AI was used to summarize this content and no one bothered to review or edit? Or maybe it was a first draft that mistakenly got published? I did order the book through kindle, as I didn’t want to wait when spring is here and I wanted to try out some of these garden planning theories, but holy smokes I thought something was wrong with my kindle or that I got bad formatting or something. Grammatical errors everywhere, sentences start and just stop with no punctuation and then the next sentence just immediately started. Some sentences don’t have capital letters to start them. If a picture is bigger than a page, it cuts off and no amount of changing the layout in kindle helps me see the rest of the picture. Captions that are supposed to be under pictures are pages later in the middle of other paragraphs. Super disappointing as this was not a book included with Kindle but one I had to pay for.

Example: ‘But more important than pollinators, the best of these attract other beneficial insects to the garden. These insect friends disease they’re doing good for the world, by helping to protect endangered insect biodiversity. can help control pests and even issues in the garden. And while doing good for our garden, we’re’

What the crap is that?? Besides the random words in the middle of the sentence, ‘we’re’ what? What are we doing???