The Sustainable-Enough Garden: Real-World Adventures of a Veteran Gardener on the Road to Sustainability

    NEWTON, MA, July 21, 2016 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Expert advice on gardening sustainably often mandates sweeping changes that most home gardeners can't achieve. Up until now, weekend gardeners who want to apply their environmental principles have had to rely on how-to books that don't fit with their busy lives. Unless you have boundless energy and unlimited time, achieving sustainability can be daunting, if not elusive. Fortunately, there's help out there.

Rebecca Warner's important new book, The Sustainable-Enough Garden (Shade Garden Press, paper, $21.95), offers a real-world perspective for those of us who need to choose a middle path, making incremental changes as we transition to sustainable gardening.

"Most people aren't professional gardeners and can't be purists," says Warner, a Massachusetts gardener with thirty years' experience. "If you aim for sustainable practices and love gardening but have limited time and energy to devote to it, this book is for you."

More than a how-to book, The Sustainable-Enough Garden is the story of a suburban weekend gardener's journey toward sustainability, with all the missteps, wrong turns, and hard-won insights along the way. The research Warner did, experts she consulted, and new approaches she tried, will enable readers to clarify their own priorities. Her book was written for like-minded suburban gardeners who want to embrace sustainability.

The Sustainable-Enough Garden addresses such challenging issues as:

- How to compost yard waste without making it a full-time job
- What is the most convenient and sustainable mulch
- What to do about your suburban lawn
- How to incorporate native plants into a garden that's stuffed with a majority of nonnatives
- How to react to invasive plants
- Whether to resort to pesticides when insects like winter moth attack
- How to shrink your garden's carbon footprint
- How much watering is needed and environmentally acceptable

"Almost every gardening decision involves an environmental dimension," writes Warner. "Although each of us knows our environmental impact is small, we realize that cumulatively our choices add up to significant positives or negatives for the natural world around us."

Rebecca Warner is a home gardener in Newton, Massachusetts with thirty years' experience working toward a sustainable ornamental garden. When she's not gardening, she's a geriatric psychiatrist. Her book, The Sustainable-Enough Garden is the story of her quest to make a beautiful garden that's environmentally friendly. In the last five years she has overhauled her garden practices, from composting to mulching, lawn care to irrigation. She blogs weekly at http://thesustainable-enoughgarden.blogspot.com/.

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