Grow Your Soil!: Harness the Power of Microbes to Create Your Best Garden Ever

by Diane Miessler

It’s possible to create a productive garden with very few inputs, no fertilizer, and no tilling. Grow Your Soil! guides home gardeners through the process of creating and maintaining rich, dark, crumbly soil that’s teeming with life while cultivating a beautiful, bountiful garden. With a combination of cover crops, constant mulching, and a simple-but-supercharged recipe for compost tea, author Diane Miessler shares with readers the techniques she used to transformed her own land over the course of a decade from a roadside dump for broken asphalt into a garden that literally stops traffic.

• ISBN13: 9781635862072
• Publish Date: 18 February 2020
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Storey Publishing LLC
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 192
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Grow Your Soil! is a tutorial and theory book for soil health and building by Diane Miessler. Due out 18th Feb 2020 from Storey, it's 176 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats.

This is such a fun and engaging book. The whole book is written around a metaphor for soil as a house. Each of the basic components are listed with tutorials for addressing the components (roof, walls, etc) and building them into a cohesive whole. For such an accessible book, the science is surprisingly correct and layman digestible. The author has a positive and upbeat writing style and the whole has a very fun vibe.

At some point in the process (and I am 100% loving it) a stylistic decision was made that this book's illustrations would be whimsical and not realistic. They're simple and naive and appealing. The worms and bugs 'talk' and the flowers are anthropomorphic with smiles and leaves outstreatched toward the sun in the cartoon illustrations. There is no photography. Highlights and special info are contained throughout the text in special text boxes for emphasis.

The author covers subjects like compost, mulch, micronutrients, garden waste management, vermicomposting, permaculture structures and more, despite the short(ish) length of the book. It's concise and well written and would be useful for all ages. This would make a great support text for a garden co-op, homeschool unit, classroom gardening unit, school library, or for the hobbyist gardener's library.

Five stars. Well done, I really enjoyed this one.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes