Uncommon Fruits Worthy of Attention
Instead
of playing the lottery, I play interlibrary loan. Each week, I
hit the library with a stack of request slips for books I've heard
about that aren't stocked by our tiny rural book-lender, and every week
something trickles down from northern Virginia to fill my voracious
book appetite. This is the saving grace of our tiny library ---
interlibrary loans are free.
I try to put in requests
for an equal number of fiction and non-fiction books each week, but as
luck would have it, this week's haul was entirely fiction. I
gulped in dismay, and headed back into the library's one small room of
non-fiction on the off chance that their linear foot of gardening books
included a tome I'd not yet read. And there in front of my snooty
nose was a book every bit as good as the ones I'd requested from afar.
In fact, even though I'd
never heard of Lee Reich's Uncommon
Fruits Worthy of Attention,
all of my permaculture gurus clearly had. Information about
species like the hardy kiwi and the Nanking cherry had eluded me
because these plants were nearly impossible to find on the internet
(even though every permaculture book mentioned them.) I flipped
open Lee Reich's book and found that it was chock full of cultivation
and propagation information for these and seventeen other unusual
species. By the end of the week, at least four of these species
will be adequately represented on the internet --- stay tuned!
| This post is part of our Uncommon Fruits Worthy of Attention
lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries: |
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Hi Anna,
I believe you have an older version of what is currently pressed as Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden (Timber Press). I love this book! A great companion to it is Reich's Landscaping with Fruit (Storey Publishing), which features both common and uncommon fruits. After reading these, I put in a few pawpaws and a quince tree in my tiny front yard. The quince is thriving but the location is a little challenging for the pawpaws, which bud later anyway. I may have some photos up soon.