Your Farm in the City

January 17, 2011
This upbeat manual for aspiring urban gardeners features a gritty but whimsical, graphic-heavy, reader-friendly layout and a 21st-century attitude that will appeal to a younger generation of gardeners intrigued by the idea of growing their own food while living in the city. Chapters on planning a city "farm" (which Taylor likens to the more modestly titled kitchen and victory gardens), intensive growing with vertical plantings, and seed starting lay out the basics in a welcoming, unintimidating manner. Discussions of preserving food and urban farm husbandry, from chickens to bees, as well as detailed information on growing a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, edible flowers, and herbs, are thorough enough to be useful and realistic. Numerous sidebars and boxes feature supplementary information as diverse as designing with children's propensity for jumping over plant beds in mind (make them narrow so the kids won't land in the middle of the bed) and recipes for exotic treats like green tomato muffins and calendula salve. Abundant, clear drawings, from oversized illustrations of insects to plans for hoop houses and beehives, make up for the lack of photographs.

March 15, 2011
First came farmers markets, raising city-dwellers consciousness of where food actually comes from and educating palates to the delights of fresh, ripe fruits and vegetables. A few urban pioneers planted cooperative gardens in parklands or abandoned lots. Recent immigrants took the movement a step further and began to raise chickens in backyard coops. In an effort to increase nutritional awareness, even the White House weighed in. For urbanites with both the available land and the spare time, gardeners from Seattles community farms offer sound advice on how to develop a productive garden on even a tiny patio. They deal with soil management and controlling all the sorts of pests that wreak havoc despite a gardeners vigilance. They offer advice on starting crops from simple lettuces up through raising rabbits and goats. Good graphic design helps simplify their prescriptions.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)