prairie point

Today I am going to tell you a little about a book I’ve had on my gardening shelf for about 15 years. It’s called The Garden-Ville Method and it was written by Malcolm Beck.

I had just moved into a house with a big yard after living in apartments for many years and I wanted a garden. Fate led me to a farm store near my house to get supplies and there near the cash register I found the little book on display. I took it home and it got me started on the right track, with organic methods.

Malcolm Beck was organic before it was cool. In the 1950’s he was working for the railroad and gardening in his spare time on his little farm outside San Antonio. He was reading Rodale publications and Acres, USA and applying what he read to his own garden. Soon he had turned an old worn-out farm into a successful organic truck garden. This little book has a lot of humorous homespun anecdotes about his methods, but it also explains the science too in a way that makes sense to the average reader.

Read more at his website. Don’t miss the article on composting yourself.

Eventually Beck got into making compost and selling it. He’s written or cowritten a number of other books, but I prefer this one because of the personal stories in it.