Crop Rotation and Cover Cropping: Soil Resiliency and Health on the Organic Farm (Organic Principles and Practices Handbook Series)

Great book

Wonderful tables and reference material. Includes a how-to-plan section and a quick overview of various crops available. For such a short work, very useful.

I'm only on page 18 and love this little book because I am learning several useful facts on each page. I am a beginner in the seed saving subject area. The book is so easy to read and yet seems to effortlessly teach a number of complex subjects, such as how a species of apple relates to our overall genetic plant heritage (there apparently used to be 7,000 species of apples and only 1,000 survive - the author compares this to books in the library, such as Macbeth or a Stephen King novel, disappearing forever, and even though we have the genetic material still, which he compares to all the words in a dictionary, we lost something that is not easy to reproduce), the difference between heirlooms, hybrids, landraces, and even how a hybrid is obtained and could be reverted to an open pollinated species. He does also talk about marketing small crops from your yard and expanding into seed growing and what one needs to consider to keep seeds true to their species - on p.17 he talks about how having only 2 isolation areas (far enough apart to keep plants from cross-pollinating) and saving seeds for 2 years, you could keep 4 species going on your land and contribute to saving their seeds for following generations. He talks about harvesting the weaker plants for market and letting the best ones go to seed to combine options for income. Very useful little book and a joy to read, even for a beginner.

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