I was fortunate to have a bright sunny week at the beach last week. I unplugged as best as I could and caught up on some reading. Thanks to a speed reading course I took freshman year in college, I’m a voracious reader. After spending much of my summer in a camp garden, my reading list these days are focused more on growing food. Here are two of my favorites.
My Empire of Dirt by Manny Howard was a rollicking adventure story about a backyard garden that went a little too far. Based on the NY Magazine article from 2007, this book will have you wincing and chuckling about homegrown food.
This book, along with Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle and Novella Carpenter’s Farm City is another example of how the food movement is morphing from farmer’s markets and backyard veggie gardens into something more substantial.
I would love to get some bees and chicken going in my backyard. Fresh eggs and local honey would be great. With the latest egg recall of a half a billion eggs, I have to believe more people are going to re-think their supermarket egg habit. 95% of eggs in the US come from industrial egg operations of 75,000 or more hens. Talk about too big to fail, or just plain too big! Smaller and closer to home is definitely better when it comes to food. A couple of hens would easily keep my family in enough eggs for most of the year.
Next read on the beach was a book about school gardens. I thought it might be dry reading but I was pleasantly surprised.How to Grow A School Garden: A Complete Guide for Parents and Teachers was the kind of book that really got me jazzed.
If you are one of those parents who are trying to make a positive impact in your child’s school, this is the book you want to read. Its also the book you want to buy for your child’s teacher. This book demonstrates all the good reasons why every school should have a garden and walks you through the steps to get one going.
As Josh Viertel, President of Slow Food USA says,
I want to live in a world where there are more school gardens than McDonalds has franchises.
This book will help you to shift that ratio of fast food to slow food in your school district.
