The 5 Best Gardening Books for Permaculture

Maybe you have been into gardening and want to take it up a level or you have begun to learn about permaculture and you want to implement it in your garden. These are the 5 Best Gardening Books for Permaculture.

If you have followed us very long you know we live in Rural America. As we began to learn to garden my husband was a commercial applicator that means he sprayed nasty chemicals on crops.

As I started learning just how bad some of these chemicals were, Jesse my husband would say things to me like “I am going to throw my work clothes in the laundry room, don’t touch them. What I sprayed today could make you miscarry the baby”. When he would say things like that I started to wonder then why in tarnation are we spraying it on our food?!

Well, these instances made a huge impact on how I wanted to grow food. I wanted none of that stuff in my food. That’s when I started to learn about permaculture, and how using these nature-perfected techniques I could grow more without ever needing synthetic fertilizers pesticides, or herbicides.

Well it has been several years and I can’t say I have perfected creating a permaculture garden, but what I can say is that we have come a long way and these 5 books have been instrumental to our permaculture-based homestead.

Best Gardening Books for Permaculture

I have read and kept several books on gardening in general but my absolute favorites have a permaculture angle. The books I have found most useful teach me how to garden along with nature instead of trying to suppress it out.

I don’t want to know how much store-bought fertilizer to use per square foot, I want to know how to grow organic plants better and bigger than anything I can find in any store. I want nature, beauty, abundance, food, herbs, beneficial insects & creatures in my gardens, that is truly permaculture. And these are the best gardening books for permaculture, hands down.

1. Miraculous Abundance

by Perrine & Charles Herve-Gruyer

This is probably my absolute favorite gardening book. No, not because it has a whole lot of how-to, but because it is so beautiful and encouraging. This book can really just open your eyes to what is really possible when it comes to growing. This book has really helped me to expand my vision on gardening, growing, permaculture, and how this could impact society in such a positive way.

This is a must have book for anyone with a permaculture vision and want to use nature to make this world a better place.

Miraculous Abundance: One Quarter Acre, Two French Farmers, and Enough Food to Feed the World

2. The Winter Harvest Handbook

By Eliot Coleman

No gardening does not have to stop with the seasons! When trying to add a winter growing aspect to your permaculture garden this book is where it is at. In the Winter Harvest Handbook all the technical and how-tos for growing all the greens and cold-hardy veggies to keep you and your family eating healthy all winter long.

The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses

3. Gaia’s Garden

By Toby Hemenway

This book is amazing. As my most recent read and a great reference book, this is one I find most valuable. If you want to know how to design and implement a permaculture home/garden/homestead this one can show you just how to do that from the ground up.

From designing key-hole garden beds to sheet mulching to what plants to use for fast-growing wind blocks. This book has so much information I know it will take me over the next decade to add much of these aspects to our permaculture garden.

If you want to know how to feed wildlife while protecting your own food supply this book has it. You want a nice healthy list of plants to have a very diverse permaculture garden, here it is. Growing lots of food in a small space, yup, here is your new BFF.

Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd Edition

4. The French Garden

C.D. Mckay

This little book from gardening times of the 1800’s. Even though this post is about the best gardening books for permaculture and this book says nothing about permaculture (mostly because that term was not coined yet when this was written) it still fit very well into the permaculture concept.

At the time this was written the french market gardeners had perfected the art of gardening to the point they had year-round fresh food (including hot weather melons growing in the french climate) growing in only small plots inside the city of Paris and everyone was fed with local and very fresh food. Now if they managed to do that then why in the world, with our technology now, haven’t we improved on this?

This book is a great resource and a wonderful starting point to growing food both for yourself or even for a market gardener.

The French Garden – A Diary and Manual of Intensive Cultivation or Market Gardening

5. How to Grow More Vegetables (and fruits nuts, berries, grains, and other crops) than you ever thought possible on less water than you can imagine

John Jeavons

Yes the title I know… But this book is great for gardeners. It is packed full of resources.

Now they don’t refer directly to permaculture gardening in this book. Instead, they call it bio-intensive gardening. Bio-intensive gardening takes a lot of similar aspects to permaculture. Combining aspects into a cohesive gardening method has proven very successful for me.

Gardens don’t thrive on “products” rather they thrive on nature and nature’s methods. Healthy soil, filled with humus, nutrients, and teaming with life is the end result when we adopt nature as our gardening partner instead of expensive stuff from big box stores.

This book shows you great ways to use that power of nature in your garden so that it can really thrive.

How to Grow More Vegetables, Ninth Edition: (and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops) Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land with Less Water Than You Can Imagine