When I first picked up Hudson River Valley Farms: The People and the Pride behind the Produce by Joanne Michaels, I thought it was a typical self-promoting regional book, meant to be sold at gift shops throughout its depicted geography. But I discovered within the farm profiles a commentary on agriculture in New York State.

Geography Lesson

Before I explain, let’s start with a brief geography lesson for those of you unfamiliar with New York state. Loosely speaking, the Hudson River Valley connects New York City in the south with Albany in the north. The book starts at the southern end of this valley and follows the Hudson River north, profiling many of the farms located in this valley. A map is included, allowing you to locate each farm and its relationship to the others and to the two major New York cities.

The Challenges of a Modern Farm in a Changing World

I thought I’d use quotes from various farmers to illustrate some of the themes the book presents to the careful reader.

…if it weren’t for the New York State agricultural exemption, the family farm couldn’t exist.
Kathy Longyear, Longyear Farm.

The closer one gets to New York City, the more land costs and the higher the real estate taxes. Without a tax exemption, many farms in the Hudson Valley wouldn’t be able to pay their taxes. Farmers closest to NYC inherited their land and repurposed it, changing the focus to take advantage of what city dwellers would pay most for. There is a constant struggle to hold onto the land when you can make more by selling it than working it.

Agri-tourism is the last refuge of agriculture.
Steve Osborne, Stoutridge Vineyard

Not everyone has the personality to have a public farm.
Thomas Hahn, Hahn Farm

Another way many farms increase their profit margin is to invite the public in–and charge them for it. Some offer you-pick opportunities, others provide tours, hay rides, mazes, community supported agriculture, classes, or a restaurant. One enterprising orchard operates a Lease-a-Tree program. These non-traditional activities have their own challenges, everything from liability issues and creative marketing to the need to smile when you don’t feel like smiling.

Diversity keeps us going, but breaks our backs.
Chris Cashen, The Farm at Miller’s Crossing

I think you need to be possessed to farm, you have to have a calling.
Maria Mikkelsen, Willow Tree Flower Farm.

One Ulster County farmer leaves at 2:30am to get to his NYC market. Another gets up at 3am to spray his trees, if that’s when they need it. On many farms, one or both partners has an outside job to supplement the farm’s income. Farming is more than physically demanding; it challenges the farmer mentally, emotionally, and financially as well. In every farm profiled, you can see the attention to detail and innovative thinking that enables these farms to survive when so many others have not.

Both Tour Guide and Documentary

The primary function of Hudson River Valley Farms is to entice you to visit these farms, and it does that admirably. The photography is wonderful, and directions to all farms, plus the markets they sell at, are provided, as well as the map mentioned previously. If you live or travel to the Hudson Valley region, you will want to consult this book for the opportunity it provides to obtain local food carefully grown. But this book also provides a glimpse into the challenges and concerns of farmers trying to make a living in the face of encroaching development, rising energy costs, and increasingly stringent regulations. If these kinds of agricultural issues interest you, this book merits a place on your reading stack, even if your armchair is far from the Hudson River.

These children toured the Old Chatham Sheepherding Company, one of the farms profiled in the book.

Thanks to Rich Pomerantz, photographer for Hudson River Valley Farms, for providing the review copy.

Even young children take gardening seriously and want to succeed. (Photo by Cadence Purdy)

I prefer to regard children as apprentice gardeners, gradually acquiring more skills as the years go by, working their way up (at their own pace and interest level) to journeyman and eventually master gardener. As much as possible, I like to let them choose their own projects, plan the execution of them, and solve their own problems. Here are three books, supposedly for adults, that do just that.

The Veggie Gardener’s Answer Book by Barbara J. Ellis serves apprentice gardeners well in several ways. It is small enough to be manageable in young hands, with a wipe-clean cover that can take visits to the garden without falling apart. The question-and-answer format makes it easy to zero in on a topic of burning interest or flip open to a random page and still grasp what’s being discussed. And it asks–and answers–lots of questions, everything from what are the easiest crops to grow to how can I make weeding go faster to how do I cope with a garden that got out of control? The first part of the book covers general gardening techniques and the second part gives advice on specific crops. There’s also a glossary, a bibliography, and a handy chart to help you determine how much to plant out of that generous seed packet. It truly is a “knowledegable gardening friend,” as the introduction suggests, a friend who doesn’t talk down to you, because the book was written for adults.

Wherever there’s plants, you know there’s going to be bugs, and Good Bug, Bad Bug by Jessica Walliser helps the novice garden determine friend from foe. The spiral-bound format of this book makes it easy to flip through, but it’s the index that makes it really useful. Look up the plant that has the bug on it, and it will give you all the pages that have bugs that frequent that plant. (By doing so I learned that sawflies were gobbling up my rose’s leaves.)

The bugs are easily identified by the photographs. Each bug gets a two-page spread that describes the damage it does and suggests preventive actions, live biological controls, organic product controls, and additional information when available. For example, adult cutworm moths are a favorite food of bats, so a good way to reduce cutworms in your garden is to encourage bats. Similar information is provided for the good bugs: who they control, and how to attract and keep them. All remedies are organic, but I especially like that the emphasis is placed on providing natural enemies of the pest and controlling environmental factors, before resorting to sprays and powders. If the bug in question isn’t in this book, it’s time to call in the grownups.

Don’t Throw It, Grow It!: 68 windowsill plants from kitchen scrapsby Deborah Peterson and Millicent Selsam is a good remedy for boredom all year round, but especially in the northern winters when outdoor gardening is impossible. This book goes way beyond avocado pits and carrot tops, teaching you how to grow not only familiar vegetables, fruits, and nuts, but also branching into herbs and spices, and produce from Latin American and Asian cuisines. You could get an education just finding some of these. Oops. Did I say education? Fortunately, since this is a book for grownups, there is none of that didactic, it’s good-for-you tone that ruins many a juvenile trade book.

Grow enough of these groceries, and you’ll learn many seed germination and plant propagation techniques–and have fun doing it. Did you know fenugreek was a legume? Did you ever consider growing beets for a holiday centerpiece? Peterson tells some funny stories on herself as well; her spirit of experimentation is contagious. I can’t think of a better way to relieve the winter doldrums than to go shopping in the supermarket for a plant to grow. As the author advises: “Always buy two of each–one to grow and one to eat.”

If you can have only one of Jeff Gillman’s books, The Truth About Organic Gardening: Benefits, Drawbacks, and the Bottom Line is the one to get. Don’t get me wrong, The Truth About Garden Remedies is an interesting and informative read, but it mostly tells you what doesn’t work, or what only “sorta” works. The Truth About Organic Gardening makes you think about what you should be doing–and why.

Jeff encourages you to think critically from the first chapter. What exactly does organic mean? Why did we stop growing organically in the first place? Is there anyone around today who thinks growing things organically is a bad idea? You might think you know what it means to grow plants organically, and why that is a good thing, but after reading the first chapter, you’ll realize things are not as simple as you thought.

First, do no harm

And you’ll soon find out that this book is really about getting the best results while doing the least harm, regardless of whether the technique is labeled organic or synthetic. Jeff’s benchmark is the environmental impact quotient (EIQ), which he calls “the only way I know of to provide a single coherent value that summarizes the potential risk a chemical application poses to both the environment and us.” No matter what chapter–soil enrichment and fertilization, weed control, insect control, disease control, and so on, Jeff gives you the full range of commonly available choices–organic and synthetic–and evaluates them in light of scientific studies. For the most part, he sides with the organic solution, but not always. And he doesn’t hesitate to point out that sometimes, the best thing to do is nothing–or something that requires observation and diligence rather than buying something. What a concept!

Guilty of poor cultural practices

Thus I found myself tried and guilty as charged when I got to the chapter on disease control. My beloved peonies struggle with botrytis, a disease that Jeff doesn’t address. (I wish he had, just so I would know if the sample of GreenCure I sprayed on my plants was worth the time and effort.) Jeff tells us that the first principle of organic disease control is cleanliness:

Remove diseased plants and plant materials such as diseased leaves (whether or not they’ve fallen from the plant) . . . This will greatly diminish the need for other disease-control techniques. If a disease isn’t around, it can’t infect your plants.

I took care last fall to cut down and remove all the peony foliage, and I picked up all the fallen leaves as well. But last spring and summer I wasn’t out there every day trimming off any leaves with a hint of trouble.

Another good thing to try is polycultures and companion planting. “. . . In many cases diseases are host specific, meaning that they only infect some types of plants and not all.” So the idea is to mix it up, with a variety of species in the same area. By planting all my peonies together in one bed, they are more likely to get infected by each other. I happen to like the idea of a peony “hedge,” and am reluctant to consider alternatives. Let’s face it, massing one plant for dramatic effect is a pretty common ornamental landscape technique, but we have to face the fact that we are making it more difficult to control diseases by doing so.

As you might imagine, proper watering and fertilizing is another principle of good organic cultural practice. Here my sin was one of omission. Beyond preparing the soil well before planting, I don’t think I’ve ever fertilized those peonies, and I don’t think they need it. But I’ve never watered them after the first year they were planted, and in some of our dry years, I’m sure they would have appreciated it. With our shallow well it just wasn’t possible, though the stress of drought could be what made them vulnerable to fungus in the first place.

I never checked to see if any of my named peony cultivars were bred to be disease resistant. It never even crossed my mind. But here’s a thought: “It’s actually a good thing that some people choose to plant varieties that aren’t resistant to diseases; if we all planted the same resistant varieties of any plant, the disease the plant was resistant to would adapt to this resistance faster . . . and the resistance would be rapidly overcome.” So I guess I’m doing my part for the continued survival of the plant kingdom, even if it’s not helping my own particular peonies.

I can’t follow this advice

I confess to plugging my ears and squinting my eyes shut against the advice Jeff opens the chapter with: “The best thing you can do with a diseased plant is to remove it from your garden to prevent the spread of disease to other plants.” I fell in love with the peony ‘Bev’ over twenty years ago, spent several pre-internet years tracking down a source for her, paid a premium price to bring her home, and then lovingly prepared the soil before planting her. And you’re telling me I should just end it, dig her up and toss her in the trash (and not even the compost because she’s infected)? Dismantle the peony bed entirely? No, I’m not ready to hear this. I’ll just try to improve my cultural practices and hope for a good peony year, weather-wise.

What does organic really mean?

The chapter on disease control gave me a lot to think about, but the last two chapters of the book give us all a lot to ponder. Did you know that

. . . the requirements to test synthetic chemicals in order to insure safety are extremely stringent but the same requirements aren’t in place for natural compounds; . . . natural pesticides are exempt from some of the rigorous testing that synthetic chemicals must undergo, such as mandatory testing for pesticide residues.

Organically grown food that you purchase at a market is probably free from synthetic pesticides, but no one is testing it for residues from organic pesticides. Not much research has even been conducted in this area, but the studies that are available indicate that both rotenone and pyrethrin can remain on food longer than was formerly thought, up to two weeks in the case of rotenone and its byproducts. This is but one of several issues concerning organic food that Jeff raises.

Finally, and most importantly, he encourages us to rethink the whole organic vs. synthetic dichotomy:

If we start to divide pesticides by natural versus synthetic rather than by their safety and efficacy in controlling pests, we’re just fooling ourselves into thinking that we’re making rational decisions when in fact we’re making a meaningless and artificial separation that could well be to our detriment.

More thinking, more research, and less grandstanding, is his plea. If you want to let go of your prejudices and garden with your eyes open and your brain in gear, pick up this book and start reading.

Congratulations to Diana Kirby, whose name was chosen at random from the pool of 51 entries to win a copy of The Truth About Organic Gardening by Jeff Gillman. Below you will find the questions and the “correct” answers.

To tell you the truth, I didn’t expect anyone to get all the answers right. For one thing, it’s the nature of a true/false test to change things from shades of gray to black and white, and if you’re focusing on a particular shade of gray, and it looks closer to black to you than it did to the test writer, well, you’re not going to pick the answer that the test writer intended to be the correct one.

For another thing, this quiz was written by the marketing department at Timber Press, based on Jeff Gillman’s book, The Truth About Organic Gardening. So it is Timber Press’s interpretation of Jeff Gillman’s interpretation of “the facts.” You may disagree with Jeff’s conclusions or you may disagree with Timber Press’s understanding of Jeff’s conclusions. Either way, you’ll answer the question differently. And there were a few questions that almost everyone answered differently.

And if English is not your native language, or you don’t garden on the North American continent, you are further handicapped for taking this particular quiz, and are especially to be applauded for being a good sport.

Yes, I thank you all for being good sports. If this quiz made you think, and perhaps alerted you to gaps in your knowledge, that’s great. That’s all it was intended to do. So here are the answers. My own comments are in italics.

Surprising facts from The Truth About Organic Gardening

1) True or false? Beer traps are an effective way to control slugs.
A: True. If the traps are placed into the ground with the lip of the container level with the surrounding soil, slugs will be attracted to the aroma of the beer, fall into the trap, and drown. A lot of “ifs” here; the trap is effective only if properly constructed.

2) True or false? Manure is always a desirable soil amendment.
A: False. While composted manure is a wonderful addition to the soil, fresh manure shouldn’t be used because it can release ammonia, which can badly injure plants. Fresh animal manure can also contain human pathogens. For example, E. coli can live in uncomposted manure for up to 21 months!

3) True or false? Garlic not only repels vampires, it will also repel whiteflies, aphids, and many beetles.
A: True. Sprays made from garlic extract and water will repel a large variety of insect pests, as long as the spray reaches every part of the plant you want to protect.

4) True or false? Corn gluten meal can suppress weeds when applied to the soil.
A: True. As long as you give it enough time to work (usually a couple of years) and reapply it each year, corn gluten meal is a safe and effective pre-emergent herbicide.

5) True or false? Any kind of mulch is good for the soil and for plants.
A: False. Some kinds of mulch, such as wood chips, can rob the soil of nitrogen, and are not always effective at suppressing weeds. If used incorrectly, mulches can damage plant stems through heat build up, and can harbor insects and diseases. On the whole, Jeff was in favor of mulches, but he did point out potential problems.

6) True or false? Japanese beetle traps are an effective way to control insect pests in the garden.
A: False. In most cases, these traps attract more beetles than they trap.

7) True or false? Praying mantises are useful for controlling insect pests in the garden.
A: False. Mantises do not eat enough to effectively control harmful insects. This is one that almost everyone got wrong. Jeff says, “Yes, it’s a predator and will certainly attack some of your pest insects. The problem is that the mantis is too big and these insects don’t tend to congregate together in large numbers, reducing their efficacy. The praying mantis is a big insect, so it can attack larger insects than those that many of the other beneficials will take on. This insect doesn’t eat enough per mantis to be a particularly effective predator for the gardener’s purposes.”

8.) True or false? Natural fertilizers such as bone meal, blood meal, seaweed extracts, and fish emulsions are a safe source of nutrients.
A: True. Natural fertilizers are a great source of nutrients and rarely need to be reapplied more than once a year because of their slow release.

9) True or false? Kaolin clay can prevent attacks from a number of insect pests.
A: True. If applied frequently, kaolin is both a safe and effective way to reduce populations of insect pests, particularly those that damage fruit trees. This is also one of the ingredients in the anti-diarrhea remedy Kao-pectate.

10) True or false? Rotenone, because it is organically derived, is a safe pesticide.
A: False. This compound is dangerous to beneficial insects and aquatic life, and is more toxic to humans than most other pesticides, organic or synthetic.

11) True or false? Compost tea and manure tea are great ways to provide nutrients and control diseases.
A: False. Although these teas may provide a small amount of nutrients, they have thepotential to spread nasty bacteria and their long-term benefits have yet to be proven. This was the other question almost everyone got wrong, and the one most open to debate. Read Jeff Lowenfel’s book Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web for a pro-compost tea viewpoint.

12) True or false? Choosing disease-resistant plant varieties is one of the most effective ways of ensuring a healthy garden.
A: True. Plants that have been bred to be disease resistant usually suffer far fewer losses to bacteria and fungi.

13) True or false? Beneficial nematodes (tiny roundworms) can dramatically lessen Japanese beetle infestations.
A: True. If soil conditions are warm and moist,these worms can kill up to 80% of Japanese beetle larvae in the area to which they are applied.

14) True or false? Insecticidal soaps are completely benign.
A: False. Although soaps are generally considered safe for humans, they can kill beneficial soft-bodied insects and damage certain plants if improperly used.

15) True or false? Vitamin D3 can be effective in controlling rodent populations.
A: True. Although it should be used with caution, vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) can kill rodents by causing elevated calcium levels in their blood. (That “3″ should be a subscript.)

Thanks to Timber Press for providing this quiz.

Next week I’ll be reviewing The Truth About Organic Gardening by Jeff Gillman, and Jeff will be critiquing my use of a common herbicide. To add to the fun and excitement, Timber Press and I have joined forces to give you another chance to win a free book. One copy of Jeff’s book, The Truth About Organic Gardening, will be awarded to someone who correctly answers all the questions in this quiz provided by Timber Press.

Please note the contest is over. Take the quiz for your own entertainment.

Yes, I’m assuming that at least one person will answer them all correctly. The answers are only true or false, after all. If more than one person gets them all right, we’ll do a random drawing from all the correctly answered quizzes. If no one gets them all right, we’ll do a random drawing in that case, too. Someone will win the book, so even if you feel kind of shaky on your organic gardening facts, don’t be afraid to try.

The answers will be posted when the winner is announced a week from today.

The subtitle of Grow Organic: Over 250 Tips and Ideas for Growing Flowers, Veggies, Lawns and More by Doug Oster and Jessica Walliser reads “for first-timers and old-timers alike,” but I think it excels at helping veteran gardeners who have been using chemical fertilizers and pesticides to make the transition to an organic approach.

Friendly and Non-Judgmental

The writing style is friendly and non-judgmental. I’ve never heard the Sirius radio program “The Organic Gardeners,” which the two authors co-host, but I imagine they sound pretty much the way they read in their book. Botanical nomenclature is kept to a minimum, and unfamiliar terms are explained. Though the book starts out detailing the reasons why a switch to organic gardening is desirable, there’s no finger wagging or scolding. There’s also not a whiff of “granola-eating hippie speak” or “earth-mother spirituality,” which a lot of people mistakenly believe they have to embrace in order to garden organically. In other words, it appeals to the broadest possible audience. (And no slight intended to hippies or earth mothers!)

Reasonable Approach

The authors are reasonable in their approach. The two of them quit “cold-turkey,” but they don’t expect their readers to do the same. Instead they outline a multi-year approach that gradually weans the gardener off chemical solutions, but more importantly, focuses on the attitude changes that are necessary for organic gardening to succeed. Too many people think organic gardening just means “stop using chemicals,” but you also have to start building the soil, monitoring for pests, and, in general, thinking and observing more. For most people, I’m sure that’s the hardest part.

I like how Oster and Walliser play off each other. Each chapter has sidebars that highlight one or the other author’s approach or experience. It’s not quite “he says/she says,” but it brings home the idea that organic gardening is not a monolithic endeavor. I also enjoyed the charts in the vegetable and fruit chapters that showed Oster’s and Walliser’s favorites side by side. There’s not much overlap!

Suits Veteran Gardeners Best

While this is a great book for an experienced gardener who wants to switch to organic gardening, I have to say it’s the kind of book that would have driven me nuts as a beginner. Just as my son gets annoyed with recipes that say, “Cook until done,” I had issues with books that said “grow varieties that do well in your area” or “keep soil evenly moist.” To a certain extent, it can’t be helped, because experience is the best teacher. But because this book aims to be a general overview for the widest possible audience, it doesn’t go into the kind of detail that a beginning gardener would appreciate.

But if you have a friend or relative who gardens with Super Feed in one hand and Bug-B-Gone in the other, this is a good book to introduce them to a healthier and more sustainable kind of gardening, without putting them off.

Next: Interview with author Jessica Walliser