FOOD NOT LAWNS – How to turn your yard into a garden & your neighborhood into a community,

Heather Flores, illustrated, Cheslea Green ’06

This is the most inspiring book on naturalizing our home & neighborhood relationships I’ve ever read, after 30 years of study & practice. I’ve visited 100s of gardens in a dozen nations & grown them in Oregon, Puget sound, Hawaii & Australia during my Permaculture design course training with Robyn Francis in Nimbin NSW.

If you want to green up your yard & grow fresh organic food at home, this is it.  Heather’s writing is lucid, clear & personal ‘how to’ do it at every stage beginning to ever growing greener.  I’ve known her since late ‘90s when she & friends began to urbanize Permaculture, ie organic homesteading with many cooperative projects, gardening in a park, seed swaps, workshops, etc.  So FNL was born of instingating local groups for green homes.  Now there’s few 1000 gardens growing food, herbs & flowers around town & 100s of fruit trees dropping food in season.

About the gardening techniques of FNL, simply beautiful illustrations of natural elements of gardening: composting, planting, mulching, water cycles, microcosmos of soil fertility in urban ecology.  It’s great for beginners to advanced.  Her chapters on “Free your lawn, Gaining ground, The Water cycle, Living soil, plants & polyculture, Seed stewardship, Ecological design, Beyond the garden, Into the community, Reaching out, Working together & The next generation” are simple, innovative & immense potentials of growing more healthy.

It contains vast resources on many all levels organic & cooperative.  She write more personal, friendly & sensitive than pioneering books by Bill Mollison & David Holmgren on Permaculture.  I’m amazed at how she’s gathered & explains 100s of ways to transform our homes & community into abundant green-belts around our yard.  It guides us into sources of fertility, beauty, pleasure, green work & cooperating with Nature & our neighbors raising awareness about 100s of codependent cycles supporting our natural living anywhere on earth. Micheal sunanda ‘06