Will Bonsall’s Essential Guide to Radical, Self-reliant Gardening bursts with great advice about growing food. The nearly 400 pages contain detailed information about gardening, farming and living off the land — interspersed between curmudgeonly rants and philosophical insights.
Radical atheist Will Bonsall’s book may offend some readers, entertain others, but provides useful information to everyone interested in sustainable soil and land management.
“I’m always peering beyond the apparent edge of my garden to see how I fit in with the universe,” writes Bonsall. The challenge is “to focus on the minute details while constantly remaining aware of the big picture.” This perspective has motivated Bonsall to farm and write the book.
On a farm in Maine, Will Bonsall and his family grow and preserve much of their own food, including grain, oilseeds and fruit. He sells seeds and nursery stock or, as he describes it “information in the form of DNA.”
In the seed section, as in the whole book, the strength lies in Bonsall’s experience. He doesn’t just rehash the same old material: he offers valuable tips based on his experiments and observations. For example, he describes how to chop leaves off the rooted cabbage plant so the core is still alive. That way, you can eat your cabbage and still plant the core in the spring to get seeds. He also describes grafting in detail and with diagrams.
The Crop section describes plants that other gardening books rarely mention — wheat, rice, pepitas, chufas, hazelnuts, elderberries and hardy kiwis. He explains how to grow, harvest, preserve and cook the crops all using small-scale, low-tech tools. His diet sounds healthy, but not necessarily appetizing.
Bonsall lives by strict doctrines. He doesn’t eat animal products or use manure (other than human) on his land. For soil fertility he uses compost and ramial chips — twigs and branches less than 3-inches in diameter that have been chopped up in his chipper-shredder. The ramial chips are used as mulch and a compost ingredient when aged and mixed with scythed grass, garden and kitchen waste and dry leaves.
A useful feature of the book is the description of tools, including a scythe, wheel hoe, broadfork and broadhoe. Bonsall uses a walk-behind tractor for many purposes including tilling in green manures even though he states “Tilling, especially rototilling, is a kind of soil genocide.”
Bonsall puts a lot of thought and effort into nurturing his soil and plants. I admire some of the no-till approaches he uses. For example, he plants a green manure of oats and field peas in early spring. Later, he uses a broadhoe to roughly turn under the growth where he will transplant squash. When the squash plants start to run, he uses a sheet of plywood to press down the green manure. He covers the compressed green manure with dried leaves to block sunlight (to suppress its growth) and twigs to keep the leaves from blowing away. The result is fertile mulch for the squash, greatly improved soil and a lack of cucumber beetle damage.
An aside: to control flea beetles in brassicas, he simmers rhubarb leaves and sprays this solution as a fine mist. (Too heavy a spray and it will roll off the smooth leaves of cabbage.)
Gardens have no borders, mentions Bonsall throughout the book, often describing the environmental impact of our choices. But he also devotes a section of the book to The Garden in Context. He offers great tips for dealing with rocks, ditches and terraces.
He’s an atheist—a point raised many times. “In the Ayurvedic tradition of India,” he writes, “Garlic and company are associated with low spiritual attainments. Boy, they got that one right: I eat tons of alliums and I’m an atheist.”’
Such opinions pepper the book. His pronouncements may be considered offensive, humorous or just tedious depending on the reader. Regardless, market gardeners, orchardists and other farmers can learn tips about sustainable soil and land management, and likely discover new crops to try. The book is a rich resource, particularly for back-to-the-landers, locavores and seedsavers.
- Janet Wallace