Review: Mini Farming by Brett Markham

Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre by Brett L. Markham
One star (so don’t waste your time); nonfiction gardening and self-sufficiency

This book has a history. “Mini Farming” has been out for a decade, having been originally published back in 2010. At that time, it showed up at our local library in the new books section and I checked it out as I always do with this sort of topic. A quick look-see said I’d seen all this material rehashed before so I returned the book fast and promptly forgot all about it.

Then, in May of 2018, my dear husband told me that this wonderful book on self-sufficiency was getting a big push via free promotions on Kindle with loads of positive reviews. Was I interested? I didn’t have to think hard. A free book on a subject that interested me? Sure, why not. I had completely forgotten that I’d seen this book before, way back in 2010.

mini farming coverThe cover looked vaguely familiar but then, all these “grow all your own food” covers look alike. I mean, how many ways can you photograph beauty contest-worthy vegetables and perfectly weeded gardens?

I started reading and quickly discovered that I did not like the Kindle interface for what should be a physical paper book. It was clumsy; not helpful when I needed to easily flip back and forth between related sections. Then I located the copyright page and realized how old this book was. Was it a new, revised edition? It was not. But I had said I would read and review “Mini Farming” for our website so I dutifully plugged away, page after page after page.

When I finished, I wrote the review. My dear husband never got around to publishing back in 2018. I didn’t care, because the book wasn’t very good.

Yet here we are.

I’m unearthing my long-forgotten, never before published review for an indifferent book because in these Covid-19 times, many of us are considering supply lines, empty grocery shelves, and thinking hard about where food actually comes from. There are spot seed shortages and many new vegetable gardens taking shape in backyards that have never seen them before. If you want to actually produce more than a few lettuce leaves and a tomato, gardening takes time and effort. It has a learning curve. Good gardening books — if read before you start digging — can answer many questions and save you time and money.

Let’s go back in time.

When I began reading “Mini Farming,” I realized I had seen this book before. But back in 2010, I had quickly discarded it as a rehash of what I already knew so I didn’t read it carefully. This time around, I read carefully. Every word. My Kindle doesn’t let me skim the way a ‘real’ book does. That can sometimes be a failing, but not this time. If I’m going to review a book, I should read the darn thing from cover to cover.

I dutifully plowed through “Mini Farming” and I can now say, definitively, this book is a rehash of plenty of other, better books. Get “Square Foot Gardening” by Mel Bartholomew (any edition will do) or John Jeavons’ How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible (any edition) instead. Heck, get a copy of Jeff Ball’s The Self-Sufficient Suburban Gardener. That book was written back in 1983 and it covers everything “Mini Farming” does and it does it infinitely better and it doesn’t expect you spend a ton of money.

Or if you want a more self-sufficient viewpoint, get Steve Solomon’s book Gardening When it Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times or Carol Deppe’s book The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times. Both of those authors assume you’ve got to grow food or your family will starve and there aren’t loads of wonderful soil enhancements readily available down at the nursery for a fee. The books I listed previously to Steve Solomon’s and Carol Deppe’s do assume you’ve got a fully-stocked nursery nearby, complete with seeds and plant starts. If you’re planning ahead for an uncertain future, keep that fact in mind.

Back to “Mini Farming.” Despite this being a new epub version of an existing book, there were typos. I guess nobody fixed them, despite having another chance. This normally wouldn’t bother me because it’s darn difficult to catch every one of the little buggers.

But these particular errors bothered me a lot because they were critical information errors. Mr. Markham discussed planting trees and said you should plant the tree nut two feet deep. Two feet deep! This is a major error and proves why every publisher should get copy-editors who know something about the subject they are editing. Any gardener, even the greenest one, knows you can’t plant seeds too deep and two feet is far, far too deep for every plant on the face of the earth.

neapolitan maple hershey
This is what a 50-foot-tall tree looks like with a 10-foot wide canopy.

On the same page was a discussion of chestnut trees. Their height was listed as being one hundred (100) feet at maturity. Yep, they used to get that tall before the chestnut blight destroyed them, starting in 1904. Then, our author tells us the canopy is ten (10) feet wide. Ten feet! Ten feet! Did anybody read this text? Conifers, typically tall and skinny, don’t grow 100 feet tall and have such a narrow canopy. Neither do poplars, a classic columnar tree. Not even palm trees grow like that! City-dwelling non-gardeners with black thumbs could not confuse a palm tree with a chestnut tree. About the only tree that does have this bizarre silhouette like an empty paper-towel tube is the incredibly rare Neapolitan Maple and even so, I don’t believe one-hundred-foot tall Neapolitan Maple trees exist. The reason I even know the exceedingly rare Neapolitan Maple exists is because there are several planted in the PA 322/Quarry Road interchange in Hummelstown, PA. They are a very strange-looking tree and unmistakable with their perfect columnar shape. They look even more bizarre when the leaves drop and you can see the branch structure. They are utterly unlike mature Chestnut trees with their enormous canopy. That’s what Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was referring to in his 1842 poem, The Village Blacksmith:

Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;

A tree canopy that was like a roof, big enough to shelter a busy blacksmith forge.

Moving on.

I’m not sure anymore why Mr. Markham was discussing chestnut trees in the first place, since there still isn’t a reliable cultivar of an American chestnut that is guaranteed blight-resistant. Musser Forests, in partnership with the American Chestnut Tree Foundation, has been trying for decades, but they’re not there yet.

There was also his discussion of growing tree fruit such as apples and not once did he mention that you have to thin the baby apples (or peaches or pears) down to one fruit every six to ten inches apart on the branches. If you let all the fruit grow, the weight of the developing fruit can break the branches of your tree. Moreover, the crowding fruit will cause blemishes, bruises, stunt growth, and encourage pests.

No, you don’t have to thin cherries. Just the larger fruit.

These sorts of mistakes make me wonder what other mistakes are lurking in the text.

“Mini Farming” also contained all the usual blue sky and unicorn mistakes I see regularly in gardening books. I garden and I used to do more of it before my back started giving me fits. I can also cook and I tried various food preservation methods too.

No, mulch does not eliminate weeding. Your garden may need less weeding than it otherwise would, but you still gotta weed.

No, you can’t do all this gardening in two hours a week. I never could and you won’t be able to either.

What’s more, you grow all those vegetables and guess what? Nobody eats them. Swiss chard grew beautifully for me and the variety I grew, City Lights, looked gorgeous. No matter how I prepared it, despite it being immaculately fresh, 100% organic, and at the peak of ripeness, it tasted like dirt. There’s also the problem of how much time it takes to pull parsnips or beets, wash them in bad weather outside on the lawn with the hose — because they come out of the soil caked with mud — and then all the time it takes to wash them again, inside, before beginning prep work and cooking.

There are many reasons why so many women joyfully said yes to ready-to-eat frozen vegetables.

There’s also the learning curve involved in preserving that enormous bounty for the winter, when you can’t grow nearly as much fresh food, and then cooking with all that canned and dried and fermented and frozen food. And where do you store it all? All this cooking and preserving takes still more time, over and above the time you spend out in the garden, time that counts. These subjects are glossed over. This will lead to awful, terrible surprises when you think you can start dinner with an hour to spare. Washing lettuces (100% organic, mind you) free of baby slugs takes time. Each leaf has to be examined, top and bottom, under running water.

Believe me. I know about the importance of carefully washing lettuce leaves. Unless, that is, you like discovering a little extra, still wiggling, juicy protein in your salad.

And I have to wonder if you are really going to be able to sell all your surplus vegetables. Some of them, sure. Or you’ll trade your excess tomatoes for someone else’s eggplants. Even so, I wouldn’t expect to make much money.

None of this is to say you shouldn’t try to grow at least your own herbs, lettuces, and tomatoes. Everybody has to eat. Anything you grow will taste better and be fresher than what you buy from the supermarket. It’s an incredibly useful skill and can make the difference in hard times. You can’t learn it fast when your kids are starving. The time to learn to food garden is when you don’t depend on it because you can drive down to the supermarket when your crop fails. But it isn’t that easy to train your family to eat a diet that is 70 percent vegetables, other than potatoes. The easiest vegetables to grow are lettuces and the like, very important for vitamins and roughage, but they don’t put calories in tummies for hard work.

For that purpose, you want potatoes, yams, parsnips, turnips, beans, winter squash, rutabagas, and beets. Don’t forget to eat the greens on the parsnips, turnips, and beets.

There are better books out there. Pay for one of them and get “Mini Farming” from the library, if you bother with it at all.