Vegetable Gardening for Organic and Biodynamic Growers by Joel Morrow

Biographies of 76 vegetables with detailed accounts of how to grow them, their climate of origin, their transformation over time, and their nutritional and therapeutic potential.

Joel Morrow began writing down his vegetable “biographies”—scribbled in the margins of a planting calendar—when his first garden teacher, Margareta Leuder, “described how as a child she had raised watermelon in the Sonoran desert in 1905.”

In the 1980s, Joel became editor of the journal Biodynamics. In it, he began his interviews with vegetables, which have continued for 30 years. This book is the result of those “biographies.” As he tell us, “Though these biographies are arranged alphabetically for convenience [from Asian Brassicas to Winter Squash], each chapter reflects my own changing point of view, depending on the date of interview. Some begin historically, some morphologically, and some so imaginatively they seem to reawaken Margareta’s childhood shamanism, which became beautifully elaborated through Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual view of nature, the foundation of biodynamics.”

This book is not only a gardening guide; it also guides the reader inwardly to perceive a vegetable as “a work of art, a journey, a rite of passage into the natural world.” Vegetable Gardening for Organic and Biodynamic Growers is destined to become not just a perennially useful guide, but also a favorite bedside book.