Editorial Review:Product Description:Can beer make plants grow? How about buttermilk? Or music—classical or rock? Are you sure abut planting trees in deep holes? And how about chasing insects with hot sauce and stopping slugs with eggshells?
Whether in ancient books, on television, or in gardening publications, remedies for all your garden woes are here for the taking: the challenge is to know what will work and what won't.
Fearlessly conducting original experiments and harvesting wisdom from the scientific literature, horticulturalist Jeff Gillman assesses new and historic advice and reveals the how and why‚ and sometimes the why not‚ for more than 100 common and uncommon gardening practices. The results will surprise even experienced gardeners.
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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
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Very Helpful
This garden remedies book was very helpful in determining which products to use in my garden and which were just a waste of my time and money. The author really took the time to experiment with different remedies to see whether or not they worked. It's a great resource.
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great for the curious gardener
I loved this book - I don't like to buy something I can make myself and I like to tinker in the garden. This book explains lots of agricultural science building blocks in a very informal, accessible manner - information that would usually only be available through heavy textbooks or a degreed horticulturist. I have a better understanding of soil, pH, nutrient availability, how fertilizers work, and more. It has the feeling of a friendly professor who really wants a beginner to understand spending a weekend sharing as much as you can digest.
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The skeptic movement comes for your garden
In an era where anti-intellectualism is on the march, where many people on both the conservative and liberal wings equate education to elitism and oppression, it's become increasingly difficult to stand for rationalist and scientific thinking. Keeping up on the latest in ecological science is almost pointless for a lay person, since the entire public face of the subject is an echo chamber of accusations of conspiracy and cover-up. In the face of all that, organic growing has grown mightily as agricultural science is tarred by association with the corrupt giants of agribusiness such as Monsanto. After all, natural is better than synthetic, right? So all-natural must be better... right?
I was wary when I first saw this book. Sad as it is, "truth" has become a loaded word in the modern press -- too often a book that purports to tell you the "truth" is little more than a fringe polemic, more political than evidence-based in nature, raving about cover-ups and frauds and gushing with prejudice and paranoia. This is not that sort of book. Jeff Gillman, a University of Minnesota professor of horticulture (and therefore a card-carrying member of The Conspiracy) puts forth a simple, well-researched book on gardening techniques in the tradition of skeptical writers such as James Randi, Carl Sagan, and Martin Gardner, with critical examinations of many gardening tips and nostrums both commercial and homemade. They're graded individually (from one to five flowers) based on how they conform to the body of scientific knowledge; extensive journal references are provided to allow the persistent reader to judge the facts for themselves. Among the findings: hydrogels do nothing useful as far as supplying water to plants; soaps, used as pesticides, can actually be dangerous to plants; organic and synthetic fertilizers are about equally useful and suffer from the same problems as synthetics; tobacco insecticides work but are expensive and rather toxic; and praying mantises are a terribly inefficient method for natural insect control, as they don't like to congregate.
Despite the mildly unfortunate title, this is a great book to have for any gardener who needs a guidebook to the body of gardening advice out there. There's a lot of advice out there, good and bad, and this book (and its sequel) are absolutely essential to anyone who needs to figure out whether that Jerry Baker recipe they're reading is any good. (Baker is never mentioned by name, but the ingredients in his concoctions seldom get better than mezza-mezza ratings.) Some investigation of things like biodynamics (basically a mixture of organic gardening and dime-store witchcraft) would be helpful, but he's got another book out too, and I've got that on order.
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A lot of fun
I throughly enjoyed reading this book. It was a lot of fun reading how the author has gone about dismantling most of the long held garden remedies. However I cannot say I learned a lot since I was already convinced (but now I have the proof!!!) that most of them do not work
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Read this before ruining your garden with "Grandma's" garden remedies
I read this book after reading several others by a so-called master gardener who recommends mixing up various potions in the kitchen. I'm glad I haven't used any of the old-time remedies, because I could have destroyed my garden in numerous ways. Beer, alcohol, ammonia used for house cleaning, and vinegar can all harm plants, although they are recommended for liberal use in the other books.
This book explains what helps and hurts your plants, and why. This will save you lots of trouble, time, and money. Ditch the old superstitions and go with what works!