 Hi again. Today's question is a very difficult one. It's what is your favourite permaculture book? Now that's not something I can easily answer. I have many favourites but it got me thinking that perhaps rather than just pick one or try and tell you about 20 in one go perhaps I might pick one a month for instance. So the most obvious one to start with this month because I've recently received it is this one which is David Hongren's latest book Retro Suburbia. David is one of the founders, co-founders of permaculture and he's written a number of books over the years. This is most certainly the largest. You can see there's a lot to it. This is the first proper big book that he's written since this one which was published in 2002. It's a very excellent book but it's quite, it's really targeted at all kind of councils and academic, the academic realm as you can see there's not a lot of pictures in it and that's fine. I got to the end of it. I enjoyed it. I found it a good read but I do like pictures and I find that pictures make a big difference when it comes to a book so it's kind of difficult to show this too much but you get a sense that this is a book with a lot of photographs and drawings and immediately is visually engaging for me. I love pictures because to say pictures save a lot of words. There's also quite a lot of words in here. 500 odd pages. Now is it worth getting? Is it worth the effort? Absolutely. Anything by David Holmgren is got to be worth having a good look at. He says right at the beginning that it's very much a book aimed at people that live in the kind of landscape that he does because you can, if you write a book you either have to be very, very broad about all kinds of things which is essentially what he was doing here and then you can't be quite so specific. Whereas he says at the beginning of this book this is very much targeted at. He's Australian. He lives in a particular kind of suburban landscape and for people that live in this landscape that's where his life has been spent, where he has these expertise, where he's been experimenting, the people that he knows, the community projects he's involved with and so on. So it's written very much with that in mind at the beginning he says he's very much writing about this and he uses an example that he calls Aussie Street which he describes the evolution of Aussie Street from the 1950s, 40s and 50s through to the present day and describes the people kind of moving in and moving out of the houses and what they've done and so on. And for me I found that interesting but I found it more difficult to engage with because I was less connected with the culture. But it does also explain how houses you know and it gives me a sense of why certain houses had another house built in the garden. It starts off with a big garden. Now you've got a big house in the other half of the garden and so on. So the cover kind of tells a little bit of story and inside the book is broken up into three main sections. You can see on the edges of the book here the color coding. So this first one is the built environment. This is all to do with houses and how we construct things. Then there's the the biological environment. It's gone with three B's to help kind of I suppose remember that. The biological environments is about food and farming and how we do all of that in suburbia which is a very particular kind of landscape. Quite a lot of houses close together usually with quite big gardens. Not always with the same kind of degree and a number of businesses and so on in between them as you would find in the town or a city. And then this last one is the behavioral environment says how do we interact with each other and so on and so forth. So there's many things for me reading the book and I haven't quite got to the end yet. There's a lot here that relates to anywhere and while he's describing how they relate to where he lives and there's a lot of case studies in here of people doing different things actual and describing how this retrofitting photographs of people doing things very nice diagrams and so on. He also relates a lot of the time he has these little icons that he initially created in this book. The 12 icons that relate to the 12 principles that he's kind of he combined and rephrased if you like to try and make them nice and easy and I particularly like the icons for me they're a really helpful way of kind of summing up what a principle is about. So throughout the book here he's been using these icons in a sense putting them into how would you use that within this particular context and you can see a number of different icons with different things and so speaking from his own experience and from many other people who have been doing permaculture kind of things I particularly like at the beginning of the built section he talks about things to look out for you know we're in the process at the moment of trying to find somewhere with a bit more land where I can teach from rather than just garden and he's got a really nice little checklist again that can be a little bit contextual in the sense that what he's talking about is very specifically about suburban houses and how to rate them in terms of you know whether they're worth going for are they on a corner do they have a triple garage that kind of thing and they have all of those things have scoring levels and some of those things won't relate to me at all in Britain we're living in a quite a different landscape but the the basic ideas apply anywhere and so I would most definitely recommend this book it's a lovely book I look forward to getting to the end of it and also starting to think about how I would use this more in my teaching as I say I've only had it for a few weeks but and it will in Britain set you back about 55 pounds but you get a lot of your money and it'll keep you busy for a long time and it's one of those books that you can read from cover to cover or you can just dip into at any particular point there's a very good index and so on so you can quite easily at the beginning here all the chapter headings and the sub headings and so on so you can quite easily skip through and say oh yes I'm really interested in that and find it very quickly so yeah my first book I face first favorite book for this month is retro suburbia by David Hongren