One Magic Square

Grow Your Own Food on One Square Metre

by Lolo Houbein

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New softcover book, 358 pages. Published 2008 by Wakefield Press

Never grown a radish? This is the book for you. Already a keen gardener? You will love this book!.

The best and cheapest food is the food you grow in your own piece of dirt. One Magic Square shows how, with a ten-minute effort, you can start your own productive food garden on a single square metre.

Most food-gardening failures occur through starting too big. By following these plot designs you can extend by one square metre each season to keep your labour pleasurable as your self-sufficiency increases. Take control of your own fresh food supply! Food gardening is the most intelligent adult endeavour on earth - Lolo Houbein shows you how to do it, and why you should.

Arranged in sections:

• How to use this book
• The Magic Square metre plots
• Toward food self-sufficiency
• Tips and tricks
• Descriptions of food plants
• Plus notes, references, further reading and useful addresses.

Awards and nominations for One Magic Square

Winner of the 2008 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards for Best Innovative Cookbook

Nominee in the 2010 Cordon Bleu World Food Media Awards - Best Food Book

About the Author

Lolo Houbein came to Australia at the age of 24 with her husband and children after growing up against a backdrop of famine and war. Lolo's great-great-grandfather was a market gardener in North-West Frisia who passed on a food gardening gene down every generation. In Lolo's youth she saw her hometown in western Holland implode under the impact of war, until all animals, birds and rodents were eaten, all fish angled, all trees used for firewood and a long winter of famine ensued during which 24,000 people died of starvation in an area approximately one-sixteenth the size of Tasmania. Food security has been Lolo's life-long preoccupation and this book is an offering for survival to those who have never even grown a radish.

Lolo was educated at the universities of Adelaide and Papua New Guinea in the literatures of Australia, Britain, Papua New Guinea, the Pacific and Africa, classical studies, world religions and anthropology. She is well known as an author of fiction and non-fiction. Her novel Walk a Barefoot Road won the Bicentennial/ABC Fiction Award. Her latest book Outside the Magic Square is also available - click here for more information

One Magic Square: Grow Your Own Food on One Square Metre by Lolo Houbein