About Sustainable Market Farming
Sustainable Market Farming is a comprehensive year-round guide for the small-scale farmer in every climate zone.
This practical manual provides:
- Detailed profiles of a full range of crops
- Info about new, efficient techniques
- Farm-specific business skills to help ensure a successful, profitable enterprise
What I Loved About Sustainable Market Farming
What I loved about Sustainable Market Farming by Pam Dawling is how very thorough and informative it is.
There is so much detail when it comes to her methods of pest control, planning and planting crops, harvesting, washing, the list goes on and on.
It feels like you are following along in a manual as if you were one of her employees.
The advice found in this book is phenomenal.
A good chunk of the book, about half, is dedicated to crops, from sowing to washing, and all the steps in between. As new market farmers, we found this section extremely useful. It has helped us plan crops for this year and start a list of crops we hope to grow in the years to come as well.
No surprise that the sections on organic weed and pest management are very thorough and useful as well.
Aesthetically, Sustainable Market Farming has a very good feel. It is clearly high quality, the pages are soft, and is just a great book to flip through.
I also like the fact that when I turn to a page, the book stays open! I don’t have to hold it open with my arm or another heavy object.
This feature is very handy while taking notes or just trying to read a section while drinking coffee. It’s a small detail like this that can really set a book apart from the others, in my opinion.
What I Didn’t Love About Sustainable Market Farming
Honestly, nothing comes to mind when I think about what I did not like about Sustainable Market Farming.
It is a handbook on intensive vegetable production, and it delivers.
All the information you could ever want on growing veggies intensively on a small-scale farm can be found in this book.
I guess if I had to pick one thing it would be because there is so much information, this book is a bit overwhelming for a newbie like me.
However, that’s not really a bad thing. The more info the better, in my opinion.
How I got over that overwhelmed feeling was taking this book one section at a time. Pretty much using it as a reference book. I definitely did not read it cover to cover.
This allowed me to learn what I needed to learn at the time and apply it. When I need to know something else, I read that specific section and then go do it.
Recommendations
I highly recommend Sustainable Market Farming to anyone who is considering starting a market farm, has already started a market farm or wants to up their backyard garden game.
It has great information on all kinds of crops to grow, how to grow them in any season, and even how to save your seeds for future use, and much, much more.
I definitely recommend it for beginners as it is so thorough and well written, but seasoned market farmers could probably pick up some valuable information as well.
Sustainable Market Farming is for people looking to start a market farming business, improve their already established market garden business, or just want to be the envy of the neighbourhood with their phenomenal backyard garden.
About Pam Dawling
Pam Dawling was born in London, England, and while at Cambridge University joined a group forming back-to-land communes. She saw organic farming as a healthy way to live and an alternative to industrialized agriculture. After gardening for 17 years in the UK, she moved to the USA.
Since 1991 she has been living in central Virginia, practicing farming with awareness of ecology, finite resources, and the future of the planet.
Pam lives at Twin Oaks Community, a secular, income-sharing, work-sharing ecovillage. There she helps grow food for around 100 people on three and a half acres and provides training in sustainable veggie production for community members.
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