This book was written for apartment, condo, and small-house dwellers. The author gives suggestions for eking home-grown/sprouted/fermented foods out of postage-stamp yards, balconies, laundry rooms, sunken patios, cupboards, windowsills, and closets. He covers vegetable gardening (using reflected light, trellising, and terracing), compact fruits and berries, sprouting, fermenting (yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, and kimchi), cultivating mushrooms, keeping chickens and bees, and composting. Somewhere in there was also a mention of foraging. He says:

“Using this book, most urban residents can learn to grow as much as 10 to 20 percent of the fresh food their families eat from an average-sized urban condominium or apartment space.” [pg xiii]

I found many interesting nuggets in this low-visual, high-text book: Mr. Ruppenthal has some great advice on making your own extra-large self-watering containers out of storage bins, and he makes a convincing argument for sprouting (convincing enough to get even me thinking about trying it).

The final chapter discusses the sustainability movement (local food, organic agriculture, farmers markets, etc.). Just before that is an unexpected chapter on emergency preparedness. After that: no index. That bit took me by surprise – there's not many non-fiction books without indexes these days. ( )

This is a good book for ideas - the author dips into gardening, beekeeping, mushroom growing, sprouts, etc... with more expertise in the gardening and sprouting areas. I may not be as ready as he is to contemplate more closely any future shortages in resources that will make more urban food production necessary, but I'm thinking I might try raspberries this spring and may try out some sprouting this winter. The writing style made my eyes roll from time to time (supernouns and "you may laugh" especially) - but I've got the book put aside to go investigate some of the web resources that he lists. I'd like to see more books on urban food production out there. ( )

This is an ideas book more than a how-to book. A lot of the advice is "go see your local plant nursery for advice."
But it is still an interesting book, and a more practical galvanizer than Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. ( )

I can't say that this book has any earth shattering information in it - if you are already growing vegetables in your apartment or have read books like Urban Homestead Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City, then you probably won't find a ton of new information in it. However the author does focus specifically on a few plants that are particularly good in low space / low light situations, such as berries and dwarf trees, so I appreciated that insight.

The author also covers fermentation, and recommends a book (Wild Fermentation The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods) that I intend to check out of the library for a more detailed view. He also brings up chicken and bee-keeping, something that both Toolbox for Sustainable City Living and Urban Homestead Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City covered. I skipped over that section, being a vegan and not having nearly enough space.

The author also covers mushroom cultivation, composting and sprouting (of which he is a huge advocate) and keeping prepared with food and water in case of emergencies. I like the mushroom and sprouting ideas, but sprouting always comes with the caveat that you have to continue to buy seeds and grains, whereas veggies provide seeds for future plants without further purchases.

I was sort of disappointed that the author seems to assume that everybody has plenty of patio space, even though this book is specifically written for apartment dwellers and people who live in cities. I only have a fire escape which dramatically limits the amount of vegetables I can grow outside. The author doesn't really mention growing veggies indoors, how that affects the growing season, etc.

I also found it annoying that the author said that apartments without outdoor space cannot compost (without worms). It's a long, slow wait, but I have been composting for awhile, and while I have yet to get my first bin totally decomposed, it's not out of the question for patient apartment dwellers to compost their organic waste.

Overall, this is a really good introduction book, and I look forward to trying my hand at growing berries and reading the fermentation book he recommends. ( )

I keep flipping between 2 1/2 stars and three for this book. What finally tipped it was the fact that there's a nice set of notes for further reading.

I've been looking for some more books on practical gardening but haven't been too successful. (I've only recently seriously started looking for). The best, strangely enough, is in the book "The Unprejudice Palate" by Angelo M. Pellegrini.

This book almost fills that nitch, but lacks just a bit of information. It seems like it's good to start getting an idea of some things that can be done and has some useful notes for further reading which I will pursue.

I think the book would have been better had some of the political and "survival" chapters had been greatly cut down or eliminated. There also seemed a weird balance of amount of space devoted to certain concepts. It seemed like there was almost as many pages devoted talking to how nutritious sprouts were to the space of actually growing them. A simple quotation or two would have sufficed.

There were also occasionally talk about equipment that could be created, but I think I would most likely end up searching the Internet for detailed plans.

It's not that I'm unsympathetic for the call to grow more locally. It's just that my motivations coming to the book stem more from being able to grow food that is expensive or usually lacking in quality at the store. (Tomatoes are a good example, so are many peppers). There's no reason to try to sell me in this particular book on the horrible looming oil crisis. I'd rather have seen a detailed plan for the self-watering containers. (There's some description and a "before" and "after" picture if I recall correctly).

It almost would make it on my wishlist, but it's just a bit too little in the way of practical information. I'd like to see more on space usage (maybe drawings or plans of example spaces), which crops are the most nutritious, what unusual plants aren't sold in stores but might be easily grown and more things like that. I'm going to use this to add some books to my "to read" collection and maybe re-read a chapter in the spring when I see it at the library again. ( )