Well, I finally finished reading Heirloom Vegetable Gardening but while I was reading it, I also managed to finish a couple of other books!  The Heirloom Vegetable Gardening tome is a great volume and I would like to have a copy of it on my gardening bookshelf for future reference.  Now, on to the other books …

I read Something from the Oven while I was in Asheville for my mom’s birthday.  This is a thorough piece of research that touches on many sources that are generally hidden from the lens of history, including practice and personal preferences.  For those interested in the social reception of new technology, the women’s movement, and food history, this volume offers something for them.  In addition, it is an easy read for those who are not academic historians and only have a passing interest in the subject. Read more »

Okay, starting next week, I am teaching elementary and middle school children writing and grammar.  In preparation for that, I have been writing some lesson plans and planning some activities.  This book, Writing Extraordinary Essays, was one of the books that Fairfax Collegiate sent me to use during my courses.  Of the books on writing that I have seen, this one is remarkably good.  It stays away from trying to teach to a test or trying to just teach a rubric and sticks to teaching the skills that make writing fun, useful, and exciting (to both read and write).

Alongside The Classic Guide to Better Writing, this book will help any teacher think about how they teach writing and the skills that are important for students to have to be successful writers.

A couple of additional gardening books that I am currently reading …

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The first book (Heirloom Vegetables: A Home Gardener’s Guide to Finding and Growing Vegetables from the Past) is an ideal beginners book.  About half of the book concerns the reasons to grow heritage vegetables and some of the details about how to find and grow them.  The last half of the book is a small selection of vegetable profiles and resources – including a very good list of seed suppliers and saver networks.  Unfortunately, when compared to the second book (Heirloom Vegetable Gardening: A Master Gardener’s Guide to Planting, Seed Saving, and Cultural History), its profiles and resources show their true limitations.  But, the little Heirloom Vegetables book would make a nice gift for a new gardener or just someone getting into those special plants.  Read more »

I have been reading a lot of gardening, farming, and cooking books lately.  While this was one of the books that Jill originally requested from the library, I thoroughly enjoyed it!  In many ways, it reminded me of reading Driving Over Lemons – which I read a couple of years ago on our trip to Spain – because of its chronological nature and honest assessment of growing your own food, but unlike that book, it hit closer to home.  Very few people will move to Andalusia and purchase a farm, but many of us could move across the country (or just across the state) to live in a community where growing one’s own food is not only possible but common.  And, this is why I enjoyed this book so much! Read more »

When I saw The Landscaping Revolution on the library shelf, I thought that it may be an interesting book.  Reading the back cover, it seemed like a good book that would focus on how to landscape without resorting the large amounts of chemicals and maybe how to deal with some of the common landscaping issues without the common answers.

In reality, this book is preach-y and written in a very annoying style!  Despite being only 160 pages long, the book’s tone made it seem way longer!  Out of the entire book, I found one section useful … from page 39 to page 41 when the subject of Native Lawn Alternatives was addressed.  In it, I learned that buffalograss (Buchloe dactyloides) is drought-tolerant and is slow-growing – only needing to see the mower a couple of times per summer.  In addition, new strains have been developed to make it even more lawn-like (in the traditional sense) and to stay even shorter (the shortest grows to only about 4 inches).  In many other sections, the environmental arguments are either way old-school or rather alarmist – a style that makes its age (only 10 years) very evident.

While I could see that this book could be a useful (though very limited) reference book, I would not recommend it as a good garden read.  There are many other books that are better written, better references, or just newer.

I wish that I could have had more time with this book, but is still a reasonably new volume and someone else in Fairfax County wanted to read it! So, I had to rush thru the last 80-ish pages on Tuesday morning before taking it back (can’t really complain because I use holds to get most of the books that I want to read from the library … it is a habit developed in Oxford working with the strange stack request system).

So, a book about a life with cheese … well, not exactly.  This is an autobiography about a cheesemonger, Gordon Edgar, that never set out to become a food professional.  Instead, he was a punk and fixture in the 80′s San Francisco counter-culture that, on a fluke, got a job at the Rainbow Co-op.  From this slightly random move from a job cleaning buses used by hippies to working at the Rainbow’s cheese section, Gordon explains how his life as a punk and his extracurriculars at university helped to shape his career as the Cheese Man. Read more »