Resources

Organizations

Bock Community Garden is a 1 acre community garden in Middleton that includes space that is devoted to growing vegetables and flowers like a typical community garden, and also space devoted to growing native seedlings, shrubs, and perennials for transplant into the Bock Community Forest.

Community GroundWorks is a nonprofit organization that connects people to nature and local food. Through hands-on education, children and adults learn gardening, urban farming, healthy eating  and natural areas restoration. Organized in Madison, Wisconsin in 2001 as The Friends of Troy Gardens, Community GroundWorks serves diverse communities and schools across the region.

Middleton Sustainability Committee holds monthly meetings open to the public and is involved in all sustainability-related efforts in the City of Middleton.

Yards to Gardens lets you share or find all things gardening. Whether you have extra space in your yard, extra tools in the garage, extra seeds or seedings, or just looking for a space to garden, Y2G makes it easy to share what you’ve got or find what you’re looking for.

 

Websites

Kids Gardening is the National Gardening Association’s website dedicated to school and family gardening resources.

School Garden Wizard was created for America’s K-12 school community through a partnership between the United States Botanic Garden and Chicago Botanic Garden.

 

Books

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver tells the story of how a family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the place where they live. Includes nutritional information, meal plans and recipes.

Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal by Joel Salatin draws upon 40 years’ experience as an ecological farmer and marketer to explain with humor and passion why Americans do not have the freedom to choose the food they purchase and eat.  Salatin’s expert insight explains why local food is expensive and difficult to find and will illuminate for the reader a deeper understanding of the industrial food complex.

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter digs deep into urban farming in an inspiring memoir of a woman who turned a vacant lot in downtown Oakland into a thriving farm.

Food Not Lawns by Heather C. Flores describes how to turn your yard into a garden and your neighborhood into a community.  It combines practical wisdom on ecological design and community-building with a fresh, green perspective on an age-old subject.

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.  Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part.

Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money by Woody Tasch presents the path for bringing money back down to earth—philosophically, strategically, and pragmatically—and with an entrepreneurial spirit that is informed by decades of work by the thousands of CEOs, investors, grantmakers, food producers, and consumers who are seeding the restorative economy.

Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv is the first book to bring together a new and growing body of research indicating that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development and for the physical and emotional health of children and adults and offers practical solutions and simple ways to heal the broken bond.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan explores the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating.

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold serves as one of the cornerstones for modern conservation science, policy, and ethics.  Through science, history, humor, and prose, Leopold calls for a Land Ethic to communicate the true connection between people and the natural world, with the hope that the readers will begin to treat the land with the love and respect it deserves.

Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver is an essay collection that brings to us out of one of history’s darker moments (9/11) an extended love song to the world we still have.  The book considers a world of surprising and hopeful prospects, ranging from an inventive conservation scheme in a remote jungle to the backyard flock of chickens tended by the author’s small daughter.

The Wisdom of the Radish and other lessons learned on a small farm by Lynda Hopkins tells the story of two young farmers and their first year of planting seeds, raising chicks, fighting off pests, and toting produce to market.  It’s a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to get food from the field to your plate.