Free Gardening books, Public Domain pre-1923

I’ve found that much of the “new” gardening information in (expensive) contemporary publications is más o menos recycled from old texts, those meaty, wonderful, captivating books that are in the public domain.

Some are available as PDFs, others must be read online or purchased from a book service.  Many are available as free e-book downloads, but OJO!  many times the illustrations are lacking and frequently the text is garbled by the limitations of the OCR (Optical Character Recognition)  involved in the digitizing.   

Best to look around online, check www.archive.org or http://www.gutenberg.org/, with luck the PDFs of the original transcripts are available, with non-garbled text and full illustrations.  At least one of these pre-1923 volumes is available on www.librivox.org as an audio book: Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway.

Here are a few that I’ve run across, in PDF, audio, and/or online reads.  Anyone who wants to add to the collection, just send them in.  The goal would be to avoid the OCR-translated volumes that frequently are hodgepodges of strange characters.  Of course once the PDF is located, it can be easily downloaded to an e-reader. 

1)   Farm Gardening, quick cash crops and how to grow them. (anonymous)   http://www.archive.org/details/farmgardeningwit00john

2)  The New Horticulture  by H.  Stringfellow   http://www.archive.org/details/newhorticultur00stri

3)   Dry Farming by J.A Widtsoe   http://www.archive.org/details/dryfarming00widt

4)  Gardening Indoors and Under Glass  by F.F. Rockwell   http://www.archive.org/details/gardeningindoors01rock

5)  Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway  by Steve Soloman  http://www.archive.org/details/gardeningwithout04512gut 
And,  as audio book from Librivox.org   http://librivox.org/gardening-without-irrigation-by-steve-solomon/

6)  Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement  by Alva Agee http://www.archive.org/stream/cropsandmethods00ageegoog#page/n8/mode/2up

7) and my favorite:  My Summer in a Garden by Charles Dudley Warner.  Excerpt:  “The lettuce is to me a most interesting study. Lettuce is like conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it. Lettuce, like most talkers, is, however, apt to run rapidly to seed. Blessed is that sort which comes to a head, and so remains, like a few people I know; growing more solid and satisfactory and tender at the same time, and whiter at the center, and crisp in their maturity. Lettuce, like conversation, requires a good deal of oil to avoid friction, and keep the company smooth; a pinch of attic salt; a dash of pepper; a quantity of mustard and vinegar, by all means, but so mixed that you will notice no sharp contrasts; and a trifle of sugar. You can put anything, and the more things the better, into salad, as into a conversation; but everything depends upon the skill of mixing. I feel that I am in the best society when I am with lettuce. It is in the select circle of vegetables.”

Making Adobe Bricks in Putre

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After the bricks are dry enough to move, about a day, they are first turned over to dry more evenly, then put on edge to keep drying and to free up space in the yard for the new bricks. Then after about a week or 10 days they can be stacked on top of each other, or used for construction. They are very heavy.





But first, get a big pile of good dirt together, wet it down.  In the background, a good example of the walls or murallas made here, ie with a rock base with adobe on top. 

Then, clay must be added to the dirt, and mixed well. 

Next step:  add straw to the mud/clay mix, stomp on it and shovel to mix it all up.  The straw helps hold the adobe together, provides stability when dry. 

Shovel the wet adobe into the form, the consistency is such that immediately the form can be taken off. Note that 2 bricks are made at a time.

Cast: Mauricio (Mauri), Avelino (Ave), Sergio the Boliviano, Pelusa (Vontuti), and little Ratty the cocker.   

Banana Passion Fruit!

Passiflora tripartita var mollissima

One plant that grows well here is Banana Passion Fruit, AKA Passiflora tripartita var. mollissima, or locally known as Tumbo. It's grown as a cash crop for sale in Arica, and most families have a few vines in the back yard.
Below right is my neighbor Avelino Flores Huanca, life-long Aymara resident of Putre and nearby Socoroma. 
I hung the old CDs to keep the thrushes and sierra finches away from the fruits, and strands of old video tape also work great. We water the plants every 3 days, and fertilize with either sheep or llama guano, a few days ago we spent all day digging up an old corral for 12 large bags of the "treasure". Recently a neighbor told me that the vines won't grow so rangy if the tips are clipped, so next time...

Resources for passion fruit enthusiasts:
Online Passiflora Journal

Everything Passiflora

Passion fruit:  make juice, popsicles,
use it in baking or just eat it in the garden

Avelino Flores Huanca, Putre, 2011