Review by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
The Super Food Gardener
A Step by Step Guide to Growing Super Food Vegetables in Your Garden
by Sharon & Andrew Cooper
Professional Nursery Growers
Queensland, Australia
Physical copy of book: AUS$ 29.95
E-Book: please enquire
The book is 170 pages in the PDF version
and is double spaced
The Super Food Gardener is a very interesting and informative (E-) book with very detailed instructions on every aspect of growing healthy organic food in your own backyard. Then again, it does not only have to be in the backyard.
However, and there is almost always invariably at least one but and caveat, there are a few things that I would like to comment on.
The main one is that the beauty, for lack of another word, of the book is being spoilt by some scaremongering that the authors engage in in several areas of the book, about commercial food growing and supermarkets and all that.
It is a given that growing your own vegetables (and raising your own livestock, though the book does not delve into that) is better for each one of us and the Planet and there is no need to come at the reader with some scare and horror stories that seem a little far fetched, to say the least. This but distracts and may even turn the one or other reader off.
On another note it would be well to take into consideration that this book is written in Australia with Australian growing seasons and thus I would advise the reader to check his or her area as to whether and how the particular plants will grow.
The copy of the book that I got was a self-published version in PDF – which is/was available for sale on the website, though now there is a physical book available (as well) – and which I printed out and bound in a lever arch file for ease of reading and annotation by means of post-it notes.
It could have done with a front piece but this may have been solved, though I do not know, in the physical printed and bound version, though the double spaced layout is a great idea and I do hope that that is being retained in the printed and bound version of the book. It makes reading so much easier.
The authors are professional nursery growers and thus, the information is, no doubt, second to none.
The PDF of the book is 170 pages packed full of information in A4 size and would have been less than that had the line spacing not been double space which, however, makes reading, especially on screen, so much easier.
Some pages could have been very well omitted and that is all those of them with the scaremongering bits and they should be edited and removed as far as possible in any revised edition. Instead the positive issues of “grow your own” should be listed only. It would also be good to have a proper front piece in any revised version of the book with copyright notices and all the rest.
In summing up I would like to say that “The Super Food Gardener” is a very good and highly informative book and would be classed as excellent were it not for the main caveat of mine that I mentioned. Scaremongering is, in my opinion, not a good way, necessarily, to start and is a method used by too many of the survivalist writers and speakers in the US that is making people close their ears nowadays.
A great book bar for that little fact of scaremongering and one of the most detailed books on growing vegetables that I have so far seen...
© 2011
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