Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard Into a Garden and Your Neighborhood Into a Community

Food Not Lawns speaks to my heart and has inspired me in my home gardening. I bought copies for two dear gardening friends who are in their 20's and 30's, and they are also excited by the ideas presented in the book. The author takes a holistic view of community and gardening, of working with Nature as an orchestra of forces influencing each other and working collectively together. Heather Flores encourages us to think out of the box and some might find that uncomfortable, but I still think her vision and sense of hope is so needed in our world today. Share this book with family and friends!

For activist readers who believe activism is a political pursuit, FOOD NOT LAWNS: HOW TO TURN YOUR YARD INTO A GARDEN AND YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD INTO A COMMUNITY offers a different viewpoint, maintaining that growing food where you live is a key method of becoming a food activist in the community. Chapters advocate planting home and community gardens with an eye to drawing important connections between the politics of a home or community garden and the wider politics of usage, consumption, and sustainability. Another rarity: chapters promote small, easy changes in lifestyles to achieve a transition between personal choice and political activism at the community level, providing keys to change any reader can use. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

When I had originally bought this book I thought it was going to give me step by step instructions for turning my lawn into a food producing landscape. However when I read the book cover to cover in less than 3 weeks (which is rare with me, I usually never read them that fast) I realized what Heather was focusing on - Community and education. She has written a book to inspire us to grow on our front lawns and talk to our neighbors about it. Get the community involved no matter who they are. After I read it and then promptly lent it to a friend with similar interests I popped in the DVD "End of Suburbia" - I listened to James Kunstler talk about how were doomed and he even mentions that growing food on our lawns may start to become mainstream. This book will guide those of us who are willing to be pioneers in the upcoming energy transition and help us help eachother grow food consciously with the small or large spaces that we now mow. What a breath of fresh air and a really inspiring, well thought out guide. Its a must read. I purchased this book with Toby Hemenways Gaias Garden and they are a perfect match, Toby goes into a more in depth permaculture perspective. A big Mahalo to Heather!

FOOD NOT LAWNS - Heather Flores, Cheslea Green '06 This is the most inspiring book on naturalizing our home & neighborhood relationships I've ever read, after 30 years of study & practice. I've visited 100s of gardens in a dozen nations & grown them in Oregon, Puget sound, Hawaii & Australia during my Permaculture design course training with Robyn Francis in Nimbin NSW. If you want to green up your yard & grow fresh organic food at home, this is it. Heather's writing is lucid, clear & personal `how to' do it at every stage beginning to ever growing greener. I've known her since late `90s when she & friends began to urbanize Permaculture, ie organic homesteading with many cooperative projects, gardening in a park, seed swaps, workshops, etc. So FNL was born of instingating local groups for green homes. Now there's few 1000 gardens growing food, herbs & flowers around town & 100s of fruit trees dropping food in season. About the gardening techniques of FNL, simply beautiful illustrations of natural elements of gardening: composting, planting, mulching, water cycles, microcosmos of soil fertility in urban ecology. It's great for beginners to advanced. Her chapters on "Free your lawn, Gaining ground, The Water cycle, Living soil, plants & polyculture, Seed stewardship, Ecological design, Beyond the garden, Into the community, Reaching out, Working together & The next generation" are simple, innovative & immense potentials of growing more healthy. It contains vast resources on many all levels organic & cooperative. She write more personal, friendly & sensitive than pioneering books by Bill Mollison & David Homlgren on Permaculture. I'm amazed at how she's gathered & explains 100s of ways to transform our homes & community into abundant green-belts around our yard. It guides us into sources of fertility, beauty, pleasure, green work & cooperating with Nature & our neighbors raising awareness about 100s of codependent cycles supporting our natural living anywhere on earth. rev by micheal sunanda

Food Not Lawns is a terrific and timely new paperback from activist and urban gardener H.C. Flores. Flores is a proponent of permaculture, a sustainable way of landscaping inspired by natural eco-systems. Her book presents a nine-step plan to transform the typical wasteland of turf into a productive, environmentally friendly "paradise garden" bursting with edible bounty. "The average American lawn," according to Flores, "could produce several hundred pounds of food a year." Food Not Lawns began as an offshoot of the grassroots group Food Not Bombs, a non-profit with chapters all over the country that provides free vegetarian meals to the hungry using donated ingredients that would otherwise end up in a dumpster. Flores' experience cooking and serving meals with Food Not Bombs gave her a new ambition; instead of simply providing food to others, she wanted to teach people how to provide for themselves. She describes Food Not Lawns as a "grassroots gardening project geared toward using waste resources to grow organic gardens and encouraging others to share their space, surplus, and ideas toward the betterment of the whole community." The more Flores learned about food, agriculture, and land use, she says, the more she came to see the typical suburban lawn as a symbol of "gross waste and mindless affluence." Flores reveals that there's nothing green about our love of lawns, which gobble up more resources and create more pollution than industrial farming. Her book explains how the weaknesses of our industrial food chain, and the unsustainable terrain of turf that surrounds suburbia have inspired a grassroots movement to grow not grass, but food. Food Not Lawns is the perfect introduction to the permaculture revolution. Flores documents how we've become enslaved by a fossil fuel-based food chain and a consumer culture run amuck, but if the "peak oil" experts prove to be right, our industrialized food system and wasteful way of life will be unsustainable. In a post-petroleum era, people who know how to grow their own produce are going to be very popular. Buy this book, and become one of them!