What do I want in a book about gardening? I want honesty. I want the author’s first-hand experience. I want to learn something new. A little humor wouldn’t hurt, either.
I want it to be well-written, I don’t want to have to struggle through awkward sentences and boring paragraphs to get the important stuff. I want it to be so good that after I put it down I keep thinking about it, and can’t wait to finish it. And when I finish it, I want to be sad that’s it’s over. That’s how good this book, The Quarter-Acre Farm, is.
It’s funny, funny odd, that I like it so much. It’s about growing most of your food on a city lot in California…you couldn’t describe anything more different from my life of growing mostly perennials and shrubs, natives and xeric plants in a rural setting in Colorado. And yet.
After I finished it, I was so sad that it was over I decided to get other books on urban vegetable farming. I wanted to continue the experience. I thought, here is an entire sub-genre of garden writing that I’ve been ignoring! I raced to the library and checked out a bunch of other titles, books like City Farmer, Urban Homesteading, Chickens in the City*–that sort of thing. They were terrible. I couldn’t get past the first few pages. They were preachy and filled with statements like “if you don’t want to destroy the earth you better stop driving your car to the store right now, and plant a vegetable garden big enough to feed everyone in your family for a year. Or longer.” Or they had long lists of what to put in compost and why you should do it their way. You don’t turn your compost? To ecological hell with you! The books were, without exception, tedious. I can forgive a lot, but please don’t bore me. Life is too short.
Why is TQAF so much better? Spring Warren (what a great name) doesn’t tell you what to do. She doesn’t boss you around. She tells you what she did, and why, she relates her successes and failures, she weaves in the history of chickens and the best stories ever about growing zucchini and not wasting it! There’s a part about goats, and their rabbit Kwan Yin, that made me wonder why I don’t have a rabbit. Halfway through the book you’ll be thinking about growing 75% of your own food in your garden, she is that gently convincing. She leads by example. She doesn’t fill her book with page after page of information you can find in any garden reference book. Because it’s her experience, and her son and her husband’s reaction to the experiment, it is all fresh and real and immediate.
I felt like her book was a perfect example of how to write, and the other city-farm books were all examples of what NOT to do when writing a gardening book. Of course, reading is very personal, and someone else might find another book fits their personality and style better. You’ll just have to read it and see what you think. I hope you love it and tell everyone you know.
*Not their real titles.
