Patrick Lima

I grew up helping out in my parents’ large garden, and last year I finally attempted one of my own. Some things worked (delicious bush beans through September) and others didn’t (my poor eggplant and pepper starts never got above 4 inches tall). Reading The Organic Home Garden I now have some ideas as to why some of my plants failed, what I can do differently, and other great plants to try – I can hardly wait until July to start fennel! This book was written in a very accessible way by show more an author who, by trial and error, now has a magnificent looking and bountiful garden. The book is nicely broken down with similar plants forming their own chapter and takes you through seeding to harvest, with a few recipes at the end for your bounty. There were several pictures throughout the book; I wish these had been labeled better and been more plentiful. As a gardening novice I found this book to be very helpful, but a more experienced gardener might be looking for something more scientific or detailed. show less

I’ve kept a small vegetable garden in my backyard for the past 20 years. Some years are better than others, but I feel I could do more to have a more consistently successful garden. That's why I was excited to receive this book from the Early Reviewers program. Also, the author Patrick Lima used to write for Harrowsmith Country Life magazine, which I often turned to for recipes and gardening tips before publication ceased in the 90's.

The first thing I noticed was that this book is not like show more the other gardening books I own which I use as reference books. This one reads more like a memoir with plenty of useful advice. Reading it is like having a cosy chat with an enthusiastic gardening guru brimming with knowledge that he wants to share.

At first I found the book disappointing because of the lack of diagrams, checklists and the like that I normally see in gardening reference books. Then, I just decided to accept it for what it is: an inspirational account of one person’s gardening experiences that, in the end, gave me a lot of information and ideas to ponder over when I start my vegetable garden next season.

Even though the author tries to give general time frames for gardening activities, the book seems best for the cooler parts of North America. A bonus is the collection of recipes that use the bounty from the garden. show less

The Organic Home Garden : A Step-by-Step Guide To Growing Food / text by Patrick Lima, Illustrations and photography by John Scanlan. Neustadt, Ontario : Five Rivers Chapmanry, 2011.

Reviewed for the LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program from an electronic Advance Reader Copy.

This is a useful book, full of great info for the novice organic gardener, but even an experienced gardener like me will learn a few things, and it’s written in an engaging, chatty style. I enjoyed learning about the show more development of the author’s garden at their rural Ontario property. There are some tasty-looking recipes, too. It is not a 100% new book – it’s a revised and updated version of an older work.

There were deficiencies in the e-ARC that made it hard to review properly – notably that all the pictures were out of context at the very end of the book and all in black and white. It also lacked an index, and a lot of the punctuation appeared as gibberish characters and made reading a chore. I assume that in the proper for-sale version these problems are corrected but I haven’t checked to be sure. show less

I rarely review text books and I guess that this counts as a text book but here goes.
First a quibble - like a lot of ebooks hitting my ereader of late this one had an irritating habit of replacing some punctuation marks with a set of odd symbols - most annoying and a major problem that publishers need to sort quickly. So annoying. They wouldn't let a cellulose book out of the door in this state and so they should not let an ebook out like it - get a grip.
For a gardening book this is show more amazingly readable. The writer has a unique voice and manages to weave a narrative into what could be a dryish text. He covers all of the key crops and techniques with gusto and manages to impart his own enthusiasm for the tasks and crops at hand. There is some repetition but perhaps that is simply to drive home the key points. In some respects his own conditions - both soil and climate - dominate to one's annoyance but he does a great job overall. I'd recommend it to novices and gardeners wishing to become a little more organic.
I feel that this could be a better ebook than it is with some well referenced diagrams and charts but I shall keep it as a reference text. show less