The Market Gardener

Les Jardins de la Grelinette is a micro-farm locat­ed in east­ern Quebec, just north of the American bor­der. Growing on just 1.5 acres, own­ers Jean-Martin and Maude-Helène feed more than two hun­dred fam­i­lies through their thriv­ing CSA and sea­son­al mar­ket stands and sup­ply their sig­na­ture mesclun sal­ad mix to dozens of local estab­lish­ments. The secret of their suc­cess is the low-tech, high-yield pro­duc­tion meth­ods they’ve devel­oped by focus­ing on grow­ing bet­ter rather than grow­ing big­ger, mak­ing their oper­a­tion more lucra­tive and viable in the process. The Market Gardener is a com­pendi­um of la Grelinette’s proven hor­ti­cul­tur­al tech­niques and inno­v­a­tive grow­ing meth­ods. This com­plete guide is packed with prac­ti­cal infor­ma­tion on: Setting-up a micro-farm by design­ing bio­log­i­cal­ly inten­sive crop­ping sys­tems, all with neg­li­gi­ble cap­i­tal outlay Farming with­out a trac­tor and min­i­miz­ing fos­sil fuel inputs through the use of the