In mid-March, gardening enthusiasts make no mistake about it: it is in season to start sowing seeds indoors and in buckets for vegetable garden vegetables (salsify, celeriac, kale, peppers , leeks). The return of spring also calls for the preparation of the land (aeration, furnishing the soil, laying out the cultivation mounds, etc.) so that it can accommodate the first plants in May. But not before because of the risk of late frost – cold-hardy seeds should only be sown in the ground if the soil temperature is above 10°C.
It is also, logically, the season for books dedicated to gardening, for all levels and all tastes. Note, among the editorial trends of the moment: practical books for gardening in apartments (My potted vegetable garden by Carole Archambault, at Rustica), for small grants (the anti-crisis vegetable garden by Rodolphe Grosléziat, at Ulmer) or for small plots (the small guide to the vegetable bed by Philippe Collignon, at First). Here are the ones that caught our attention.
A vegetable garden for novices
Accompany neophytes and pass on knowledge learned on the job or through reading. This is the point of My self-sufficient vegetable garden by Alexis Surre, published by Leduc (22 euros), which has just been published. The book, designed as a manual, is based on a simple idea: achieve a lush vegetable garden without having to go “more than two hours a week” outdoors. The author, 40, who promotes his passion for “Sunday gardener” on Instagram, tells about his fashion methods “Do as little as possible to get as much as possible” and according to the principles of permaculture (thus slow and without chemistry). It’s because this amateur beekeeper, city dweller during the week, only has access to the garden of his family home in Normandy on weekends. Alexis Surre therefore sought the techniques “as efficient as possible” to fulfill his objective, which is to feed his family with fruits and vegetables produced in the garden at least six months of the year. Collected in a book, they provide some easy-to-follow leads (against diseases and pests, in the choice of tools). And especially without taking the lead.
My self-sufficient vegetable garden by Alexis Surre, ed. Leduc, 22 euros.
A vegetable garden for “the lazy”
It is said that gardening is often a matter of meticulous work on the land and therefore involvement. It may be misleading. And an old bestseller from the 70s, Garden without getting tired, published by Tana, finally translated into French, attempts to demonstrate this. Its author Ruth Stout, an American gardener and pioneer of organic, developed in the 1950s in Connecticut a radical method of minimalist gardening “without any tillage”. The essence of the Stout method, available at the time in books and conferences, is in fact based on the fact of spreading a thick layer of hay mulch on the ground and letting nature take its course without weeding, hoeing or compost. “She gardened in a revolutionary way, one could say without grandiloquencewrites the agricultural engineer Didier Helmstetter, cantor on his YouTube channel and since a heart attack of lazy gardening techniques and without too much physical effort. When we read today what Ruth Stout wrote in 1961, we can only be appalled by our blindness at the time. Even the organic pioneers had their blinkers on.” Something to delight the curious, especially since the edition is enriched with scientific notes from the Alsatian gardener who discovered this pioneer late in life, to his great regret.
Garden without getting tired by Ruth Stout, ed. Tana, 17.90 euros.
A vegetable garden for the daring
The latest proposal, at the heart of a book by gardener and youtuber Rémi Kulik (140,000 subscribers to his channel Le Jardin d’Emerveille), published in February by Terre Vivante editions: the creation of a “garden-forest”, “forest nourisher” (term deposited by the Quebec permaculturist Wen Rolland) or “edible forest”. Let’s say that the case is more in the expert mode of gardening and flourishes (two books at Ulmer, one at Larousse) in the related edition. The principle ? Nothing better to boost the productivity of plantations and ensure their long-term stability than to imitate the very particular ecosystem that is a forest with its different layers of plants (on the ground, climbing, shrubby or arboreal).
“It is a garden conceived as a global system, composed of different elements interacting with each other, producing an abundance of resources that will be shared between the living beings that compose it and the gardener or the gardener who cultivates it”, specifies the nurseryman, who created his garden-forest in the Tarn. At the same time practical, complete and very documented, its manual is aimed at those who wish to embark on this agroecological form of gardening, provided that they have defined a clear project (in terms of surface area, money, time to devote and objective) and to know its limits, warns Rémi Kulik. Because this “vegetable orgycan equally have a subsistence, pleasure, educational or commercial vocation with different implications. You might as well avoid crashing and ending up disgusted.
The Living Earth Guide to the Forest Garden, by Rémi Kulik, ed. Living Earth, 35 euros.