week 5: my garden companions

this week on the little dream farm

Feb 02, 2025

I had no idea y’all would love last week’s Farm Note topic as much as you did! Given that we’re early in the year and ahead of the growing season I wanted to provide you with three more resources that have been really valuable to me in hopes that it’ll help you plan this year’s gardens!

We closed on the Little Dream Farm in late-September 2021. Before that, David had mentioned to me that he’d love if after closing I’d make some time to stay in the area so he could personally show me around the farm, teach me what was growing in the gardens, take me to the farm where he gets chicken feed, drive me by the local farm supply stores he used, and then introduce me to some of the neighbors.

It was such a generous offer and I was so grateful for our time together and for all the insight that helped us in so many ways in our first days on the farm.

Now, David had been gardening since he was just a boy, but he shared with me three books that at the time he’d discovered just a handful of years prior that he said transformed the way he thought about, constructed, and tended to his gardens. If these books had such a big impact on a lifelong gardener, then absolutely as a beginner gardener, I wanted to read them.

I ordered them as quickly as I could and read through them all one in a row from cover to cover in those remaining weeks leading up to our move. That time between finding the farm and moving to the farm—beginning of July to the end of October in 2021—was such a precious time for me…I spent it daydreaming every day of this life we’d finally found after several years of searching for the perfect farm of our own.

So today I wanted to share with you those three books and tell you what I love about each one of them. Reading them at the time felt like they gave me a window into David’s perspective, and it also helped me see how he designed such beautiful gardens on the LDF.

There is no one right way to garden. And there’s no one perfect method. And sometimes what works in one garden doesn’t work in another. But…I can say with confidence that if you apply some of the techniques in these three books, you’ll be certain to improve the health of your garden and ease some of the work…and it may even shift your mindset about your gardens as they did for me.

I love that these were David’s garden companions when he stewarded the Little Dream Farm…and now they’re a companion to me, too.

So without further ado…

Share this little dream life

David’s Top Three Gardening Book Recommendations:

I'd like to share them with you in the order I read them because that felt like a little adventure in and of itself…

The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book by Ruth Stout and Richard Clemence
I loved reading about sweet Ruth and her wonderful gardening methods—she was so ahead of her time. Back when people were digging and tilling and hoeing and weeding their gardens into oblivion, Ruth was piling big thick layers of mulch (mowed grass clippings, old leaves and some very old straw or hay is great for this method) onto her gardens and enjoying the weed-free nature of her garden, improving the health of her soil, and not having to worry so much about watering because her soil was protected and thus retained moisture from the mulch. Today, no dig, no till, mulching gardening methods are all the rage, but I happened to think learning about it from Ruth was my favorite way to learn it.
The Findhorn Garden by The Findhorn Community
This is a story about hope, faith, belief, and making a way where there seemingly is no way. It’s no wonder the Findhorn Gardens drew such interest and created such a loyal, loving community. This book made me think a lot about our place in nature and how we as humans often force our way upon virtually everything, thinking that with our brains and our brawn and our sheer force that we can make everything in this world bend to our will. This book will make you think about how to work with nature, how to work with the garden and the soil and the micro climate and the space you have. It will help you to create a beautiful symbiotic relationship with your garden, what grows in it, and everything that surrounds it.
Great Garden Companions by Sally Jean Cunningham
When I asked David about his garden layout he told me it was mostly intuitive—that he’d start by planting one thing and then would just intuitively know what and where he’d plant something next. While David had almost seven decades of gardening under his belt, Sally’s book will help lay the foundation to develop that intuitive sense by understanding how specific plants compliment one another in the garden (or don’t!). This was like having a roadmap to think about garden layout and there are lots of resources out there like this today but I happen to think Sally does a wonderfully encouraging job teaching her material.

There you have it, friends! The versions I have shown in the photos above are the same versions David had, too. You may be able to find them if you do a little more digging around online but I’ve linked for you versions that are the same, two just have different covers.

Do let me know if you pick up any of these books and read them—I’d love to know what you think of them and if you plan to add what you learn from them into your gardening plan for this year.

Happy reading and happy planning!!

week 5: my garden companions

this week on the little dream farm

David’s Top Three Gardening Book Recommendations:

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