The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower's Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming Paperback - 2014

From the jacket flap

Grow better not bigger with proven
low-tech, human-scale, biointensive farming methods

...should be of great use to market growers everywhere. ---Eliot Coleman, organic farming pioneer and author of the Winter Harvest Handbook

This is a fantastic addition to any aspiring market gardener's library... Jean-Martin has laid out all of the basics for how we can farm more profitability, productively, and passionately on a more human-sized scale. --- Josh Volk, Slow Hand Farm, Portland, Oregon
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Les Jardins de la Grelinette is an owner-operated micro-farm which feeds more than 200 families through their thriving CSA and seasonal market stands. The secret of their success is low-tech, high-yield production methods which help them grow better rather than bigger, making their business more lucrative and viable in the process.

The Market Gardener is a compendium of La Grelinette's proven horticultural techniques, packed with practical information on:
- Setting-up a micro-farm by designing biologically intensive cropping systems, all with negligible capital outlay;
- Farming without a tractor and minimizing fossil fuel inputs through the use of the best hand tools, appropriate machinery and minimum tillage practices;
- Growing mixed vegetables systematically with attention to weed and pest management, crop yields, harvest periods and pricing approaches.

As local organic agriculture continues to flourish, young professional growers like Jean-Martin Fortier and his wife Maude-Helene Desroches are leading the way with their innovative ideas about farming. Based on low-tech, high-yield methods of production The Market Gardener is a complete, modern, micro-scale farming handbook which shows that making a living wage growing food without large capital outlay or access to an acreage may be closer than you think.
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... picks up right where Eliot Coleman has left us, applying many of his core principles, but doing it in such a brilliant way as to provide beginning farmers a solid framework of the information they need to start up and become successful small-scale organic growers themselves- Adam Lemieux, Product Manager of Tools & Supplies, Johnny's Selected Seeds

In France, The Market Gardener has quickly become a book of reference for small-scale farming. Both visionary and practical, it is a work of rare intelligence. --- Charles Herve-Gruyer, permaculture teacher and grower at la Fermedu BecHellouin, France

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Jean-Martin Fortier is a passionate advocate of strong local food systems, and founder of Les Jardins de la Grelinette; an internationally recognized model for successful biointensive micro-farming.