Grow a Sustainable Diet

Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth

By Cindy Conner
New Society Publishers
March 2014

Everyone loves to prepare a meal with ingredients fresh from their own garden. But for most of us, no matter how plentiful our harvest, homegrown produce comprises only a fraction of what we eat. And while many gardening guides will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about individual crops, few tackle the more involved task of helping you maximize the percentage of your diet you grow yourself.

Grow a Sustainable Diet will help you develop a comprehensive, customized garden plan to produce the maximum number of calories and nutrients from any available space. Avoid arriving in August buried under a mountain of kale or zucchini (and not much else) by making thoughtful choices at the planning stage, focusing on dietary staples and key nutrients. Learn how to calculate:

Which food and cover crops are best for your specific requirements
How many seeds and plants of each variety you should sow
What and when to plant, harvest and replant for maximum yield

Focusing on permaculture principles, biointensive gardening methods, getting food to the table with minimum fossil fuel input, and growing crops that sustain both you and your soil, this complete guide is a must-read for anyone working toward food self-sufficiency for themselves or their family.

Cindy Conner, is a permaculture educator and founder of Homeplace Earth. She is the producer of two popular instructional DVDs entitled Develop a Sustainable Vegetable Garden Plan and Cover Crops and Compost Crops in Your Garden. A former market gardener, Cindy was instrumental in establishing a sustainable agriculture program at her local community college which she taught for over a decade. Her passion is exploring growing a complete diet in a small space and getting food from garden to the table while minimizing the use of fossil fuels.

See the book here.