Editor's Choice: November 2009
When the cooler weather hits New England, we settle in more hours during the shorter days than during our recent warm summer. Filling those hours can be a chore, if you don't want to sit and watch television or hit the refrigerator all day long.
Here at King's Grant Farm, we have no television or cable service and most everything is homemade, so there are no beckoning bags of chips or boxes of cheap cookies.
That leaves us with books, books, and more books. And since we have the very best small library in New Hampshire, there are no limits to what we have access to.
Coop, A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting by Michael Perry. 2009 Harper Collins. This book isn't for the farm geeks among us, but for the general population who enjoys reading about country living in a lusciously entertaining fashion. Down-rooted, Perry's story telling and authentic writing details the how-tos and the adventures of a pig farmer. You may not run out and buy a couple of hogs, but after reading this book you may be enticed to purchase a couple chickens or Mr. and Mrs. Goat. Whether you live in a NY penthouse, a San Francisco duplex overlooking the Pacific, or on an acre in Minnesota, you'll come closer to appreciating where our food comes from and how respecting our food animals is the right thing to do. This is an approachable book.
Earth to Table by Jeff Crump and Bettina Schormann and with photographs by Edward Pond. 2009 Ecco, by Harper Collins. WOW! What a book. The photos delight. The writing is crisp and yet enticing. It is obvious that the authors did their research, as when they speak of a topic, they know well the subject matter. I know. I can tell. There are areas where they do not go into as much depth as I would like, but for the novice, they present a framework from which to dig deeper. The recipes are seasonal. They match what we would have available in northern New England. I'll end where I started: WOW!
The Curse of American Agricultural Abundance, A Sustainable Solution. Williard W. Cochrane. 2003 University of Nebraska Press. No doubt. This is the type of book that you would expect to be published by a leading institute of higher education in our nation's heartland. But don't run away just yet: it is a short book. It is filled with terse, concise, cogent sentences. It's not over-the-top academic, although everything is evidenced based, to be sure. There are two parts to this book. The first is the policies of the mid-90s and the second is the policies for 2002 and beyond. It is current. It contains what folks like Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver talk about. This is the seminal piece. Do we save family farms? Is our agriculture abundance a curse or an opportunity? Or, will we continue the policy treadmill from the 1990s? You can handle this if you want to. Because, it is good to dig a bit deeper than what you read on the home page of these Web sites.
Complete Houseplants. Jack Kramer. 2008. Creative Homeowner. Full color. Easy-to-read descriptions. Seasonal care chapter. This book is fool proof, which is why I like it. I have so many awesome houseplants that were given to me by a girlfriend of years past, and I have this deep down yearning to keep them alive just so that I can prove to her that I'm not all that dumb when it comes to indoor plants. (The kicker: we have no relationship now, so there would never be an opportunity to show her that I have kept the plants alive and even propagated some! But, in my own mind, I have this goal.) But seriously, we can keep our houseplants on the open porch all summer, soaking up the bright sunlight and thriving beautifully. But when it comes time to bring them inside, with our often drafty, warm, moisture-less rooms, our houseplants can die within days. This book should be a staple on your home reference shelf--whether you have something to prove to an 'ole lover or not.