Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Book Reviews and a Good Smellin' Mystery

I finally spent the last bit of gift certificates I had to Amazon thanks to my lovely mother and brother for Christmas (and quitting smoking!).

To go along with my new gardening kick I picked up the following:

McGee & Stuckey's Bountiful Container: Create Container Gardens of Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits, and Edible Flowers

I really like this book. The first portion goes into detail on exactly what you need to start gardening with and how to go about it. I'm pretty much inept when it comes to this area so I needed a good, solid background of information before I started getting my hands dirty. The rest of the book goes into detail on different varieties of veggies, herbs and fruits. I've already referenced it countless times while planting my seeds and checking to see if they should have sprouted yet!


The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre!

This book didn't go into as much detail per crop as the first one did, but it contained much more information on actually homesteading from your backyard. There was great information on how to make beer/wine, diagrams of utilizing your space effectively, how to prepare meat (vegetarian here!) and much more. Since a good portion of this book does focus on raising and eating meat it's not as informative to me, but I really liked how they showed the possibility of harvesting 1400 eggs, 50 lbs of wheat, 60 lbs of fruit, 2000 lbs of veggies, and 75 pounds of nuts on just 1/4 an acre!

Finally - the $1,000,000 question of the day!
Le Bf introduced me to the most AMAZING smelling tree/giant bush thing ever and we have no clue what it is! Any help i.d.'ing said plant will be returned with our unwavering love and devotion :D



2 comments:

Heidi Renée said...

Jasmine? It's hard to make out the flowers in the picture, but the leaves look similar.

EtsyFoodSnob said...

I think your right! He said it smelled very similar to a perfume he had smelled once, and sure enough Jasmine is listed as one of the notes in that perfume :)

Thank you!