Today, I'll take a brief break from our forest gardening lunchtime series to plug our upcoming book club.  We'll start discussing the first chapter of The Holistic Orchard during our regular Wednesday lunch post next week, so I thought I'd try to drum up interest by singing the praises of the author and book.

Michael Phillips is one of the few gardening authors I've read who combines decades of hands-on experience with a thorough understanding of ecology and permaculture from the scientific and popular literature.  His first book, The Apple Grower, is so good that I'm starting to feel the need to re-read it --- I felt like many parts of the book went over my head on the first perusal and would help me now that I've moved from being a beginner to an intermediate fruit-grower.  For comparison's sake, the only other gardening authors I've wanted to reread lately are Paul Stamets and Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier.

I've only flipped through The Holistic Orchard and read about ten pages so far, but I can already tell that this second book is going to be as good as, if not better than, Phillips' first.  And it also feels like a dense (but readable) book that could benefit from being bounced around a group.  If you have any interest in growing fruit trees or bushes, I highly recommend you join the club in October and read along --- chances are The Holistic Orchard will open your eyes to a whole permaculture world you didn't even know existed.