Books

Here are some of the books in our growing library of literature on the topics we cover: urban agriculture, sustainability, local food movements, community gardening and development. If you are an author who has published a book on any of those topics, send us an e-mail. It would be our pleasure to schedule an interview with you.

“Green Cities, Growing Communities: Learning From Seattle’s Urban Community Gardens by Jeffrey Hou | Julie M. Johnson | Laura J. Lawson
University of Washington Press, paperback, published Oct. 2009, $40.
This wonderful and timely book examines:
- Planning and design strategies that support the development of urban community gardens as sustainable places for education and recreation.
- Approaches to design processes, construction and stewardship that utilize volunteer and community participation and create a sense of community.
- Programs that enable gardens to serve as a resource for social justice for low income and minority communities, immigrants, and seniors.
- Opportunities to develop active-living frameworks by strategically locating community gardens and linking them with other forms of recreation and open space as part of pedestrian-accessible networks.

The Farmers’ Market Book: Growing Food, Cultivating Community
By Jennifer Meta Robinson and J.A. Hartenfeld
Quarry Books, 2007
As farmers’ market proliferate around the country, this case study of one market in Bloomington, Ind., offers a wealth of practical information along with rich, colorful stories of people and a place. Authors Jennifer Meta Robinson and J.A. Hartenfeld describe in detail the rewarding intersection of rural and urban lives that meet regularly at farmers’ markets for more than just an exchange of currency and produce. Farmers markets sustain and heal our communities and our relationship to the land.
From the introduction:
“Based on an ancient hallmark of society, farmers’ markets today sate a hunger not calculated in the FDA’s recommended daily allowances. They incorporate patterns of community and exchange that feed us deeply. The recent resurgence of farmers’ markets nationwide signals a desire among many for a sense of authenticity and locality that is not found in the high-tech supermarket experience. Buying local potatoes with traces of soil from a grower who still has the same dirt on his books apparently provides a kind of sustenance not accounted for in the latest nutritional pyramid.”