Gaia's Garden
by Toby Hemenway · first published 2000
4mentions
4recommended by
4HN commenters
2017–2020first – last mentioned
100% recommend
Whatever size yard or garden you have to work with, you can apply basic permaculture principles to make it more diverse, more natural, more productive, and more beautiful. Best of all, once it's established, an ecological garden will reduce or eliminate most of the backbreaking work that's needed to maintain the typical lawn and garden.
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…might just... except she had a massive apple tree whose match I’ve seen maybe once, and I’ll be dead before any tree I plant is over 18”. Secret Life of Trees, Mycelium Running, and to a lesser extent Gaia’s Garden (by the late, great Toby Hemenway) all have different vignettes about solid ecology that created as many questions as they answered, but lacking a teacher that can be a good thing. I’m slowly filling…
on “Is it better to plant trees or let forests regrow naturally?” ↗Sure! When I started learning about agroforestry I looked for english books on the subject but didn't find good ones, Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway have really good info you could use. But in portuguese I've so a few good PDFs here, I guess that's because of the work of Ernst Gotsch here in Brazil, here's a good video that summarize…
on “UN experts denounce ‘myth’ that pesticides are necessary to feed the world” ↗…for natural surroundings and different human landscapes. Anyhow, I'll get down off my soapbox now, but it's been a surprisingly rich vein of practical innovation and fun. If you're curious, check out "Gaia's Garden" by Hemenway or one of Bill Mollison's books (former in Portland, so small yards, latter doing more wide-reaching stuff in Australia and developing nations).
on “Keeping bees means thinking about landscape as a system” ↗…(Fritjof Capra) ^Capra's work has heavily influenced my worldview and ability to think in systems Designing Data Intensive Applications (just finishing this week) Permaculture One & Two, Gaia's Garden, Edible Forest Gardens I&II Black Swan, Antifragile, etc. (Nassim Taleb) Cloud Hidden: Whereabouts Unknown (Alan Watts, written late in life) Ishmael, Story of B, etc. (Daniel Quinn)…
on “Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?” ↗