Every day I bring you an item on Amazon that I personally use or has been purchased by many members of the audience and I have researched enough to recommend.

Today’s TSP Amazon Item of the day is Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway.  I am often asked where to start with Permaculture and quite often by people with small properties.  This is THE BOOK to get for that first step.

Gaia’s Garden is what I would call very approachable.  Basic concepts are introduced like minor earthworks with swales but in a real world usable way for the person who isn’t going to rent an excavator.

Toby focused on what we call zone one and two design primarily in this book.  That is the stuff you work with often, a garden, an herb garden, small scale aquaculture, planting trees in your back yard, etc.

Toby was really a master are explaining complex permacutlure principles in a very understandable way.  If you want to produce abundance in your back yard, get Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway.

Remember you can always find all of our reviews at TspAz.com

P.S. – I had the great fortune to meet Toby, tune in for that very funny story.  After that we became very close friends, seeing each other in the real world only occasionally but talking by email and text very frequently.  Sadly in December my friend lost a fight with cancer and passed away.  I am grateful in addition to many videos of him teaching he left us two great books.

Toby was a great man and a good friend.  He was humble and kind, we worked together despite some political differences because we knew the results we wanted were the same.  I watched him as an open minded man move from a center left political position to full on anarchist and make one of the most eloquent cases for it I have yet to hear.  It was this transformation that led to his second book, The Permaculture City.   We discussed this in detail in episode 1919 on Liberation Permaculture.

Toby was a rare person in that he saw anyone who wanted anything that he wanted as an ally, he cultivated those alliances in spite of any and all differences.  This book, his videos, courses and other things he left behind are an amazing legacy.  Please no that his widow receives the royalties from his books, so by adding them to your library you are helping his legacy to his family as well as to the permaculture community.