Paperback, 240 pages
by Eric Toensmeier
ISBN: 978-1603583992

Paradies Lot is a funny and charming story of two single guys, both plant nerds, with a wild plan: to realize the urban permaculture garden of their dreams and meet women to share it with. Amazingly, on both counts, they succeed.

When Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates bought a duplex in the Massachusetts Rust Belt city of Holyoke, the tenth-of-an-acre lot was barren ground and bad soil, peppered with broken piece of concrete, asphalt, and brick.

Within several years, the two friends had created a "permaculture paradise" replete with more than two hundred low-maintenance edible plants in an innovative food forest on a small city lot. The garden - intended to function like a natural ecosystem with the plants themselves providing most of the garden's needs for fertility, pest control, and weed suppression - also features an edible water garden, a year-round unheated greenhouse, tropical crops, urban poultry, and silkworms.

At times, a story of personal journey and discovery and at times a manual for developing an urban oasis, Paradise Lot will appeal to permaculture geeks and romantics alike.