Review: Unreadable Book with a Misleading Title
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 01 16, 2013
This book has to be the most poorly written I've ever attempted to read.The title of the book is misleading and false. It has no information about homesteading and only attempts to present information about vegetable gardening. There is little usable information on gardening either.I knew there would be trouble when I tried to read the first chapter entitled "Planning a Garden First Step - Be Aware of the Consents and well as Restrictions in Planning." Huh? The rest of the chapter is as opaque as the heading.The next chapters have more understandable titles, but the text is still as obtuse and poorly written. There are numerous grammar errors, errors in word usage, and sentence fragments that make me wonder if the author is fluent in English. Examples:From Chapter 6 "Start Your Own Vegetable Garden""You may purchase low-priced kit for pH testing and several of these garden store centers will be willing to do a soil sample testing for you."From Chapter 7 "Container Gardening""You can get additional information from an extension county office. The system of zone is applicable to perennials such as berries, fruit trees, perennial flowers and herbs."In addition, other sections of the book simply seem out of place and one has to wonder if they haven't been "borrowed" from other sources. More examples:Chapter 9 "Edible Wild Plants and Mushrooms" comes out of nowhere and seems to have been cut and pasted from some other book. It simply doesn't fit in with any of the other chapters, and the writing style not only is totally different from the rest of the book. It seems to be UK-based with the mention of "truffles were sold for thousands of pounds." This especially seems odd when other references in the book are US-based, such as USDA planting zones. No information is given that would be useful to a home gardener much less a homesteader since it basically tells the reader that you can't grow these at home and doesn't explain how to forage for them.Chapter 10 "All the Best Crops to Grow and How" mentions the "Millennium Bug" several times explaining how having a garden is a good thing to do in case the bug hits hard and recommending "great Millennium garden crop" items. Er, we're in 2013 now, well past the whole Millennium scare.There are many, many, MANY more similar examples throughout this book.In short, don't waste your time, money, or even the downloading time on this book. If it were possible to give it zero stars, or negative stars, I would. Run far, far away, quickly!