Reading Material

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 were:

Fukuoka, Masanobu; The One-Straw Revolution (1978): This is a very famous book among natural/organic gardeners. Translated from Japanese, it is Fukuoka’s account of how he changed the way people looked at agriculture in Japan and developed his own very clever no-till methods that can be adapted and used by anyone anywhere in the world. This is a very short book, and doesn’t take long to read, which is handy for an e-book you are trying to read on a computer screen.

Burr, Fearing; The Field and Garden Vegetables of America (1863): This is a great historic account of the edible plants cultivated in the US in 1863. A complete manual for the vegetable gardener. The book discusses the pros and cons of different varieties available at the time, as well as offering advice on cultivation. It’s great fun to read the old style English language and word choices used in the book. It’s interesting as well to look at the Latin names assigned to the different plants at the time and compare them to modern Latin names, because they’ve changed quite a bit.

Søren pointed out this book to me:

Krasil’nikov, N.A. Soil Microorganisms and Higher Plants: The Soil and Health library in Tasmania, Australia describes this as one of the most important in it’s collection. Written by a Soviet scientist, it is a detailed text of soil sciences as they were seen in the time. While the west was busy developing new plant varieties and agricultural chemicals, this book describes the approach that was taken in at least part of the Soviet Union to boost it’s agricultural yields.

Lieven also pointed me to a UK Soil Association publication, and with a little browsing on their website I see they have quite a few interesting things available for download. They seem to regularly regenerate the links on their website which makes it impossible to link to any of them here, because the links would stop working by the time I posted them. They have no reuse policy or Creative Commons style licensing that I can see so I sent them an email asking for permission to make some of their publications available for download here, but they didn’t reply, so I don’t have permission to do that.

What kind of organization goes to such trouble to make reading material available to the public, but then makes it impossible to reuse?

Anyway, if you care to, you can go to the UK soil association website and use their search engine to find some of their publications. A few I would recommend are:

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