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Fruit and Vegetable Gardening in Australia, Mike Pollock and The Royal Horticultural Society. The back cover of this book claims that it is "The definitive guide to growing fruit and vegetables successfully". It may well live up to that claim. It contains a huge amount of information from eight different contributors. Covers vegetables (herb plants) and also trees (e.g. fruit trees). It doesn't focus entirely on organic methods but does discuss them.

Click here to purchase from Australia $35.99 AUD

Easy Organic Gardening and Moon Planting, Lyn Bagnall. I just love this book. It's not laid out like a glossy magazine-page-style gardening book, just a plain old fashioned book with plain text. There are no pictures and the paper is nice and thick novel-style book paper, which is not glossy and does not smell of toxic chemicals in the way that colour books do. I find this book really easy to read, I love to pick it up and read bits from it and I have been learning heaps from it since I bought it. It's not the most basic book so I would not recommend it as your first and only vegie gardening book, but if you have either another basic book (with pictures) or a bit of experience, I would absolutely recommend it. It includes a good section on container gardening.

Click here to purchase from Australia (The Nile) $44.49 AUD
On special (limited time) from Sustainable Insight $42.00 AUD

Organic Gardening, Peter Bennett. This is an awesome book, which is devoted entirely to organic methods of growing plants. Almost all of the book (all of it except for about 5-10 pages) is about food plants rather than flowers or other ornamentals. The back cover states that it is the accepted major work on the subject of growing and cultivating plants in Australia and New Zealand using natural methods.

Click here to purchase from Australia $39.95 AUD

The Permaculture Home Garden, Linda Woodrow. This is one of the most loved and best known practical permaculture books ever written. It is an extremely practical book, more so than Rosemary Morrow's Book and much more so than the books by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren (which are great books, but more like design books). The spiel for this book says "A totally integrated system of gardening - a labour-saving way to grow fruit, vegetables and herbs that taste great and help to keep the environment healthy".

Click here to purchase from Australia $35.99 AUD

Earth User's Guide to Permaculture, Rosemary Morrow. This is another of the classic permaculture books. It is Australian but could be easily applied to any country. It is in between a theory/design book and a practical book and covers the same kinds of topics as you learn in a Permaculture Design Course (PDC).

Rosemary is one of the original Permaculture teachers in Australia (or anywhere) and has vast experience with teaching people the principles of permaculture. I went to the launch of the second edition of this book, and I also caught up with Rosemary at a group workshop, "The Work That Reconnects", run by Clare Power of Transition Blue Mountains. The workshops (which I highly recommend) may possibly run again in future, there are details here of the one that I attended.

Click here to purchase from Australia $30.49 AUD

Backyard Self Sufficiency, Jackie French. There is now a 2009 update of this classic self-sufficiency book. This is a great book that covers a whole range of topics including "Small animals for small gardens" and "Growing in adversity". The section about how to start a box garden from this book is reproduced here on survival.org.au.

Click here to purchase from Australia $19.99 AUD

Living the Good Life: How One Family Changed Their World from Their Own Backyard, Linda Cockburn. This is a great book describing how Linda Cockburn and her family (her, Trevor and Caleb) went on a mission to live for six months without spending any money at all, while living entirely off the produce from a large-ish suburban backyard (not on acreage). It is written in diary format. Highly recommended. Their website is www.lintrezza.com.

Click here to purchase from Australia $26.99 AUD