Free Gardening Books
Sandra just posted about a great site in Tasmania, Australia where you can download free e-book copies of gardening and health related books in cases where they are either out of print or the copyright has expired.
This reminded me of Project Gutenberg, based in the US but with affiliates all over the world. They currently have over 100,000 books in total available online for free download, and are expanding their collection all the time. Searching on gardening or gardening related topics gives you a number of titles to choose from. All of Project Gutenberg’s collection are books that are too old to be copyrighted any more.
There are both some advantages and disadvantages to finding gardening books this way. While basic gardening techniques haven’t changed that much over the years, some things have. I was reading a book which if it had been a modern version it might have been discussing spacing the rows of plants in your garden so you could use a garden tiller between them, but in this case it was discussing spacing the rows of plants so you could fit a horse and plow between them.
Heirloom gardening enthusiasts will appreciate being able to read about the varieties of plants that were favored by gardeners, many of which are still available via plant and seed exchanges or other heirloom gardeners.
If anyone comes across any particularly good books this way, I hope you will leave a comment or post about it somewhere so the rest of us can have a look! Also, does anyone know about more places to download free books other than the two mentioned above?
Comments
9 Responses to “Free Gardening Books”
**************
Leave a Reply
Name, email and website fields are all optional. Anonymous comments are welcome. It's nice if you leave a name, even if it's not your real one, just so we have something to call you.
See this post for comment policies. In principle, comments are not moderated here, but rather automatically screened for spam then posted. Because of a new caching system, there may be a delay of a few hours before your comment appears.
If you leave a comment here that isn't spam, and doesn't appear within a few hours, something has gone wrong. Please get in touch. Your comments are important and I don't want to lose any by accident.
Hi Patrick.
Thanks for the links. In christmas I will spend some time reading Krasil’nikov, N.A. Soil Microorganisms and Higher Plants. Looks very interesting.
Also noticed an english translation of old roman Cato’s writing on gardening, in case the first gets undigestible.
Yes, I downloaded Fukuoka’s ‘One Straw Revolution’ last year, and can recommend that as an inspiring read.
Hi Misshathorn,
I came across a copy of it on a friend’s book shelf last year and thumbed through it, and it looked interesting. I’ve just downloaded it.
It’s a very famous book and I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. It’s also small, and won’t take much time to read.
Thanks for the tip!
Hi Pat & Steph,
Thanks for telling me about Gutenberg: I’ve been reading The Field and Garden Vegetables of America (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21682/21682-h/21682-h.htm)
It’s great historical record of lots of veggie varieties & it also deals with interesting unusual esculents. Escu-what?
[...] | Tagged as: Book Reviews, Environment, Garden, Science Thank you everyone who left comments on my Free Gardening Books post from several days ago mentioning books. A few that stood out for me [...]
Thank you very much for the information I really appreciate it!! I found this useful site for Gardening Seeds
please send me gardening books of all kind Flowers and plants with generic name and real name indoor and outdoor with lot of thanks.
Hi Farwa,
I don’t know of any free gardening books like that, but with Google you can usually find this kind of information in different places on the Internet.
i want to learn gardning