The only problem I have with Seattle Tilth‘s new book is the title: Your Farm in the City: An Urban Dweller’s Guide to Growing Food and Raising Animals.
We can all agree that’s too long. But Seattle Tilth does know from farming and gardening, and it’s what’s inside the book that counts. (Find it at Elliott Bay Book Company.)
It is 325 pages (not including a helpful index) of just about everything you need to know about farming in everything from pots and planters to raised bed and backyards. Plus there’s information on chicken coops, hives, rabbit hutches, and goat sheds. Written by Lisa Taylor and “the gardeners of Seattle Tilth,” the book showcases the immense amount of knowledge embodied in Seattle’s green thumbs, while Taylor conversationally explains everything from soil composition and means of irrigation to the best time to grow spinach.
The layout is especially lively and readable, so I have to call out Red Herring Design for praise. The book is lavishly illustrated, from the stern-looking chicken on the cover, to compost bin options, to the maps of garden development, over time, in the back pages. Throughout are charts, charts, and more charts, all helpfully breaking out what you need to know. After a single read-though, it’s easy to imagine how well-thumbed certain pages will become.
The book assumes no special gardening knowledge, just curiosity about getting into eating very locally. (If you’ve downloaded that locavore app, why not step it up?) Procrastinators will be delighted to find Taylor assuring them that the best way to plan out a backyard garden is to map it out over the course of a year, observing sun and shade patterns as they shift, along with your own behavior: what’s convenient from the house, which areas do you never visit?
One of the biggest mistakes a newbie makes, apparently, is reconfiguring their yard, at significant expense, before learning where the sun exposure is, or that the wind really howls around that corner. Seattle Tilth’s motto is slow and steady and on the cheap, and to that end the book instructs you on how-to a lot of things, including rain barrel set-up, compost piles, and worm bins.
More than once I caught myself shaking my head at the level of “tips” detail. Taylor tells you how to lay out your vegetable beds so that your kids can jump over them, rather than through them. (See the index: “Layout of urban farm: children, in consideration of, 37.”) How to replace a leaking hose coupling (with visual diagram). Why to give cilantro a haircut. How to make paper pots for seeds. How to conduct a sediment test.
Probably most important, though, is something woven into virtually every page, which is that this is a book for Northwest gardeners and “city farmers.” With growing things, it’s location, location, location. Growing seasons are different, soil composition is different, sunlight has a different intensity. You have different predators (seed-eating crows!). That hard-won local knowledge is absolutely vital, and it’s a wonderful thing to see so much of it collected here in such a friendly resource.
