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 best hand tools, appro­pri­ate machin­ery, and min­i­mum tillage practices
• Growing mixed veg­eta­bles sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly with atten­tion to weed and pest man­age­ment, crop yields, har­vest peri­ods, and pric­ing approaches

Inspired by the French inten­sive tra­di­tion of maraîch­er and by icon­ic American veg­etable grow­er Eliot Coleman, author and farmer Jean-Martin shows by exam­ple how to start a mar­ket gar­den and make it both very pro­duc­tive and prof­itable. Making a liv­ing wage farm­ing with­out big cap­i­tal out­lay or acreages may be clos­er than you think.

Jean-Martin Fortier is a pas­sion­ate advo­cate of strong local food sys­tems and founder of Les Jardins de la Grelinette, an inter­na­tion­al­ly rec­og­nized mod­el for suc­cess­ful bioin­ten­sive micro-farming.