Reddit Reddit reviews Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd Edition

We found 4 Reddit comments about Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd Edition. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd Edition
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4 Reddit comments about Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd Edition:

u/JoeFarmer · 13 pointsr/homestead

Producing 50% of the food for 6 people off 1/3 acre is a tall order. I would recommend looking into edible food forests for the wooded area(research agroforesty and edible food forests), and edible perennial landscaping for the front yard to stack functions and bring those areas into production. You could also keep your chickens and coop in the wooded area, so as not to waste space in your "open area". If you are planing on raising eggs to sell, they typically are a loss-leader until you get to about 150 birds, which doesn't sound feasible for the amount of land you have. With that in mind, I'd keep your flock small; 6-10 birds, depending on how many eggs your family eats a week.
If you have the time and the energy, I would highly recommend John Jeavon's "Grow Biointensive" method. This method produces more food with less water and less space, however, to be able to plant as close together as he recommends, you have to follow ALL of his steps. That means double digging, which is pretty labor intensive at the very beginning of the season.
As for fish, seems like you could set up an aquaponics greenhouse, which can be expensive to start up but wonderful once going, or you can dig a pond.

EDIT: To add resources.
http://www.johnjeavons.info/video.html - video introduction to bioitensive. (on your scale I might skip out on the compost crops)

"How To Grow More Vegetables*" By John Jeavons is a wonderful resource.

Gaia's Garden: A guide to Home-scale Permaculture by Toby Hemmingway

For greenhouse production: Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long

If you are thinking about a market stand of some kind, The Organic Farmer's Business Handbook: A Complete Guide To Managing Finances, Crops, and Staff - and Making a Profit

u/thomas533 · 6 pointsr/Homesteading

You don't need acreage to get started. Many urban lots have plenty of room for doing everything you want. On my urban lot (8000sqft) I currently have 6 chickens, 3 beehives, a 100sqft greenhouse, 200 sqft of raised beds, 10 fruit trees, plus many more edible shrubs, ground covers and other plants. I plan on adding more fruit trees, ducks, and rabbits soon. I have rainwater harvesting set up to supply all my outdoor watering needs and will be installing solar on my house this spring to supply most of my energy needs. I am in no way completely self sufficient, but I can supply my self with two or three meals a day during the summer and at least one a day during the winter. But more importantly, I've learned how to grow food, save seeds, graft trees, raise some animals, etc. And when I move in to a larger piece of land in a few years, I already know what works and what doesn't, what I like doing and what I don't, and how to avoid many of the common mistakes that new homesteaders make. So, start now. If you don't have a yard, grow in containers. Read and learn. I can't recommended Gaia's Garden and Squarefoot Gardening enough.

u/jmunsters · 2 pointsr/gardening

The Rusted Vegetable Garden, both the blog and the YouTube channel is good for vegetables.

Bookwise, the Vegetable Gardener's Bible comes up a lot. Gaia's Garden is a really great resource for a full home landscape/permaculture too.

u/allonsyyy · 1 pointr/gardening

It's not really a guide, but You Bet Your Garden is pretty great if you like podcasts.

I've heard a lot about a book called Gaia's Garden, but I haven't gotten a chance to read it yet. Despite the hippy dippy name, it's supposed to be quite firmly science-based.

You kind of have to take it one plant at a time, google "growing cherry tomatoes" or something like that.

Salad greens are super easy, chard is really reliable for me. You can probably open sow that now or soon, it (and most salad greens) actually prefer cooler weather.

Herbs can be easy or hard to start from seed, depends on the herb. I can't get lavender or rosemary to sprout for shit, but cilantro and basil pop up in a jiffy.

Bell peppers are pretty hard to grow down here in zone 7a, godspeed in 5b.