CREATIVE, PRODUCTIVE GARDENING

FOR GOOD TIMES AND BAD.

The Resilient Gardener is so essential, timely and important, and I will recommend it to everyone I know. . . .
Carol Deppes lens is the gardenwhich is great for gardeners, but really, she speaks clearly to all of us. . . . This

In an age of erratic weather and instability, peoples

interest in growing their own food is skyrocketing.
The Resilient Gardener presents gardening techniques
that stand up to challenges ranging from health
problems, financial problems, and special dietary
needs to serious disasters and climate change.
Scientist and expert gardener Carol Deppe
draws from emerging science in many fields to
develop the general principles of gardening for resilience. Gardeners will learn through Deppes detailed
instructions on growing, storing, and using the five
crops central to self-reliance: potatoes, corn, beans,
squash, and eggs.

THE RESILIENT GARDENER

is a wise and intelligent book. DEBORAH MADISON,

author of Local Flavors and Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

The Resilient Gardener is the most comprehensive and detailed book about gardening that I have read to date, and
I could not find one sentence that I would quibble with.
. . . A must-read for beginning gardeners, and full of
details even the most experienced will find invaluable.
GENE LOGSDON, author of Small-Scale Grain Raising
and Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind
Carol Deppe is informative, funny, and intriguing. . . .
The Resilient Gardener is the quintessential guide to
gardening from an authority who also knows how to enjoy herself. DIDI EMMONS, author of Vegetarian Planet
Carol Deppes celiac-friendly approach to gardening and
nutrition provides a wealth of information on how to
overcome food intolerances many are confronted with
each day. If you struggle with food allergies or sensitivities . . . this book is for you. PETER H. R. GREEN, MD,
Director, Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University

$29.95 USD ISBN 9781603580311

The Resilient Gardener is both a conceptual

Chelsea Green Publishing

PO Box 428 White River Junction, VT 05001

802-295-6300 www.chelseagreen.com

and a hands-on gardening book for all levels of experience. Optimistic as well as realistic, Deppe offers
invaluable advice for gardeners (and their communities) to flourish.
Cover design by Jennifer Carrow / Cover photos by Carol Deppe

THE RESILIENT GARDENER

Food Production and Self-Reliance
in Uncertain Times
Including the Five Crops You Need To Survive and
ThrivePotatoes, Corn, Beans, Squash, and Eggs

DEPPE

Learn how to:

* Grow food in an era of wild weather and
climate change
* Garden with little to no irrigation or storebought inputs
* Garden efficiently and comfortably (even with
a bad back)
* Customize your garden to deal with special
dietary needs or a need for weight control
* Make breads and cakes from home-grown corn
using original gluten-free recipes (with no
other grains, artificial binders, or dairy
products)
* Keep a laying flock of ducks or chickens,
integrate them with your gardening, and grow
most of their feed
And more . . .

THE RESILIENT GARDENER

Praise for

Chelsea
Green

CAROL DEPPE

The Resilient Gardener

figured that if the ducks ever got a disease that

was transferable to people, we would probably
catch it a lot faster and more directly than via
contamination on vegetables.
Horse manure is hotter than manure from
ruminants, who digest a much larger part of the
plant material in their feed. Pure poultry manure
is especially hot. Most manure, however, is usually
a mix of bedding and manure, so it is substantially
diluted. Of even greater concern to me back when
I was buying compost is the fact that the manure
and compost were often left out in the rain, so
all the soluble nitrogen would be leached out. If
you have access to manure, get it as fresh from the
back end of the animal as possible, haul it home,
and cover the pile to protect it from rain.
When you spread manure on land, dig it in
right away. Much of the immediately available
nitrogen can dissipate into the air as ammonia.
In days of yore, people used manure spreaders
and spread the manure directly on the land before
tilling or digging. These days, those operating on
a smaller scale often instead turn the manure into
compost to get around any potential problems
with disease.

However, with humans being such a large part

of the biomass of the planet, it isnt going to be
workable to wash valuable sources of nutrients
like human excretory products into the waterways
for much longer. But to use humanure, you need
a thorough composting process for it. See Joseph
Jenkinss The Humanure Handbook for information on making and using humanure.
I find the fact that I waste my own waste inefficient and philosophically displeasing. I hope to
have a composting toilet some day. And pastures
and a home orchard to put the humanure compost
on. But as for putting humanure, even properly composted, upon vegetable land any time
soonthat isnt in the cards. We sell some of our
vegetables. Using humanure compost on them
wouldnt be legal. And even if it was, who would
buy humanure-compost-fertilized vegetables? If
you are eating all your own crops, you have more
options.

The Power of Pee

Using human urine is a much simpler proposition than using humanure, which also contains
feces. Urine from healthy people generally doesnt
contain pathogenic bacteria or parasites and is
in fact sterile at the time its excreted. With our
current vegetable garden, pee is off limits because
we sell some of the vegetables. I feel pretty confident about the safety of pee, but using it on other
peoples vegetables isnt something I would want
to have to explain to anyone. But during prior eras
of my gardening life I used pee regularly, though
intermittently. I was never so short of fertility as to
need to collect all the pee. Instead, I just used it in
situations where it was particularly advantageous.

In traditional agriculture in Japan, China, and

Korea, humanure was never wasted. In Japan,
for example, every bit of human waste went into
honey pots and was used on the gardens and
farms. This pattern has to be viewed along with
the cultural patterns in which all vegetables were
cooked, and all water was drunk boiled into dilute
tea. I was a school-kid in Japan in 1958. One
day the science teacher brought in and dissected
pig organs he had obtained from a local butcher
shop. The display of fluke worms, tapeworms, and
other parasites was memorable.

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Soil and Fertility

Leaves

Once upon a time I did various experiments on

nutrient-poor grass. I found that a 1:10 dilution
of pee did not burn the grass, and it made it green
up within a few days after just one dose from a
watering can.
I collect my first pee of the morning in a bucket.
Later pee is pallid stuff. Both color and odor
suggests that the first-early pee is more concentrated. My guess is that there are more nutrients
in the first batch of pee after waking than in all
the pee put together for the entire rest of the day.
So I collect the first pee and forget the rest.
I use the pee right away. It has a strong ammonia smell, which indicates nitrogen escaping from
it that I would rather have in the garden. In addition, within a few hours of sitting around, the pee
grows bacteria. I doubt the bacteria would hurt
anything, but I do know they are eating up the
nitrogen I want for the plants. When I use urine,
it is usually because I want a quick shot of soluble
nitrogen, not nitrogen tied up in bodies of bacteria.
So whenever Ive used pee, I have used it promptly.
When I use the diluted pee in the garden, I
dilute it in a watering can and water both the
plants and the ground. Plants can take up nutrients through their leaves as well as their roots. I
didnt use the pee on plant parts I was going to
eat, such as lettuce or green onions. It was probably safe to do so, but I didnt think it was appetizing. But the pee sure worked well on the corn
and squash.
If I were short of fertilizer and needed to save
and use all the family pee, I would encourage
people to pee in buckets and defecate elsewhere.
Its just so much easier to use pure pee.
If you have plenty of leaves in fall, just pile them
up and wet them with diluted pee. The extra
nitrogen is all they need to compost beautifully.

In chapter 5 I described how to make soft garden

beds using just leaves and the labor contributions of night crawlers. Well-decomposed leaves
can provide all the organic matter necessary for a
garden. Mowed leaves make better mulch. Leaves
make good poultry bedding, especially mowed
leaves. Leaves can also be the high-carbon component of your compost. All you need to make great
compost from your leaves is something else with
a lot of nitrogen in it. Animal manure works fine
(as does pee).

Fertilizing with Grass Clippings

One morning when I went down to a far section
of yard to weed the multiplier onions, I noticed
they looked a bit peaked and yellowish. The grass
around the onion bed was a foot high or more
and threatening to shade out the onions, and
also needed to be dealt with. So I quickly cut the
grass from immediately around the onion patch
with a sickle and spread it between the rows of
onions. A week later, when I next looked at the
onions, they had colored up nicely. When freshly
cut grass or weeds are watered or rained upon,
useful amounts of fertility leach out. This soluble
nutrition provides a quick but gentle jolt to the
growing plants just when they need it the most.
Afterwards, the rest of the grass remains on the
surface of the garden soil and provides additional
longer-term fertility as it decays.
Nitrogen is a particular problem in spring. Its
very soluble, so any free nitrogen tends to wash
out in our winter rains. Microbial action can
release nitrogen from organic matter later in the

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