Grow Now

October 18, 2021
Pass the Pistil blogger Murphy (Grow What You Love) delivers an encouraging primer on gardening as a way to combat climate change. She shoots for a simple equation: “my garden + your garden + your neighbor’s garden = save the planet one garden at a time,” and argues that people shouldn’t succumb to the idea that climate change is too big a problem for ordinary people to confront. Murphy begins with an overview of carbon, the “essential building block of life” and “the main ingredient in soil organic matter,” and offers tips for maintaining soil health, most of which involve fostering biodiversity. She outlines a slew of regenerative gardening practices, including no-dig gardening, composting, and planting native crops. There’s a comprehensive plant guide, too, which covers edible perennials (such as artichokes, asparagus, and chives), edible perennial vines (grapes and chayote), bird and butterfly favorites (including buckwheat and milkweed), and soil builders (broad grass and clover among them). Murphy’s account is loaded with easy-to-implement tips, inspiring photos, and useful lists, and she’s full of passion: “In our gardens, we can repair ourselves and our plots of earth with our own two hands.” New gardeners will find this a fine starting point, and those with dirt already under their nails will enjoy the nudge to try something new.

November 1, 2021
Nearly all of the material shared here by Murphy (Grow What You Love, 2018) can be accessed in other guides, but it's her reframing of gardening as a critical factor in mitigating global warming that makes this book so potentially impactful in the hands of a beginning gardener. "We can build and employ energy-consuming carbon-scrubbing machines to remove atmospheric CO2," she writes, "or we can plant seeds, care for the soil, and foster biodiversity, which, in turn, naturally captures and stores carbon from the atmosphere. Which sounds more elegant to you?" To those who choose to garden, she offers a wealth of information on pretty much every aspect of the topic, from developing soil to selecting plants, creating compost, and attracting pollinators. She also covers recent, important trends, like substituting ecologically fragile peat with other seed-starting materials, and not tilling, which unearths weed seeds and disturbs the soil's life-giving microbial network. With a list of related sources and a bibliography, Murphy offers a positive and doable approach to addressing our climate crisis.

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