The Permaculture Market Garden: A visual guide to a profitable whole-systems farm business

I loved this book. It is beautifully hand illustrated, making it wonderful for a more visual learner. I bought this book because I was interested in applying permaculture principals to a large scale (we wanted to do a CSA) and it shows how to do exactly that, but I also think the systems could be easily scaled down to homestead size. There are so many good tips on what veggies to plant together and what can easily be rotated right after. Also, many permaculture books I have read seem to be geared for warm weather climates. This author lives and farms in Canada so it is informed by his experiences. I appreciated this as I live in a place with seasons, although I think this book would be valuable to gardeners/farmers in any climate. It really is one of my favorites. I would buy it again.

I am a certified permaculture designer with hundreds of acres of farm and forest of my own. I also have hundreds of books related to this topic.My initial impression of this book is that it is very thoughtfully laid out and has strong visuals. I really appreciate the formatting and how he handles mapping and holistic planning. Many of the permaculture books that I have do not address profitability, or at least not well and this is a worthy addition for that at the very least.Understand that you are not getting the depth of folks like Mollison or Whitehead, but that can be a plus for many.I would recommend this to folks just getting started in permaculture, as well as those looking to transition from homestead level food production to running a profitable permaculture market garden.

While it isn't light reading, it has a tremendous amount of information and ideas. I would recommend it to others interested in this subject

Amazing. This book could be, should a school in itself.

A beautifully illustrated guide to applying permaculture methodology to commercial scale farming. If you're new to permaculture but have experience of mid to large scale farming, you'll appreciate that Zach Loeks, the author, spends about two thirds of the book explaining the mind set and theory behind the practice of permaculture as applied to commercial farming. When I say 'commercial farming' understand that I'm talking of market garden scale commercial farming, not industrial scale agriculture.If you already have a grip on permaculture and are looking to turn your project into a business, there's a some sound advice on this too.As a starting out market gardener with a permaculture background, I bought this book mainly for info on Zach's 'Permabed' system. I have to say that while I've learnt his lingo now, it took an awful lot of flicking back and forth to find definitions or explanations of the many acronyms, abbreviations and terms that he uses. Maybe a lot of them come with a formal agricultural education or for all I know are his own creations. Either way, I didn't know them and wished aloud on several occasions that he'd just written the thing out long hand. Many of them aren't even in the glossary. Having said that you can find them bracketed after the first use of the term... if you can find it.As you can see, I still rate this book 4 stars, so while my complaints stand, I none the less enjoyed this book immensely and found it motivating and useful to boot. I will be adapting his permabed system to my farm where applicable (though I seem to already be doing alot of the things he talks about, which is encouraging!) and watching how things develop over the next few years. A good book well worth consideration.

My garden planning bible!!

There’s some solid material to glean from here, but overall the book is poorly written and structured. There's a lot of needless repetition of some of the concepts, and not enough coherent explanation of many others. A number of illustrations don’t communicate enough detail to be useful, or are confusing to follow in their flow. Many sentences and sentence fragments are clumsily worded, or are cluttered with jargon that doesn’t get defined very well or early on enough, and they have to be read and re-read to be understood. This author is clearly a talented grower and designer who has lots of wisdom and experience to share, but he is not the best communicator of ideas. I recommend this book in general, but you should know that it’s not an easy or very pleasurable read. If you have a background in permaculture, market gardening, and farming in general, you will get more out of it. But even with this background knowledge, I think many will find getting through the material to be a slog.