We have a garden/farm outside Lusaka in Zambia. Zambia has 3 distinct seasons: 1. Warm/wet, 2. Cool/dry and 3. Hot/dry.
We are looking for literature on tropical gardening. Can any one suggest appropriate literature? We have searched the online bookstores without being impressed.
Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated.
Tropical gardening literature suggestions
Here are links to tropical gardening sites and books:
http://www.tropicalpermaculture.com/permaculture-books.html
http://www.tropicalpermaculture.com/
http://www.prota.co.ke/en/home
http://www.villageearth.org/pages/Appropriate_Technology/ATSourcebook/Agriculture.php
http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/perma.html
http://www.agroforestry.net/aflibr.html
Hope that helps.
What kind of plants are you planning to garden / farm with?
This may be a good place to get help with tropical gardening. Just ask some questions!
Aloha, Dave
Thanks for the links Dave. I am actually quite into permaculture. I grow a variety trees, fruits and vegetables. And try to make in into a system. We have 10 acres.
My wife is more into flowers, shrubs and things “closer to the house”. Right now a collection of Calla Lilies seem to be her pride and joy. But she is lacking information and inspiration. That’s why I thought of buying her a good book on tropical gardening for Christmas.
Books out of Australia might be what you are looking for as they are rather keen on permaculture and have a large tropical area. Maybe you can google some Aussie bookshops.
If you check out www.EdwardRHamilton.com they have discounted books on tropical plants and permaculture. The only take checks and I think they only mail to the USA but if you see things you want you can probably work around that.
katie
Thanks for the feedback! I will check out the link and try to find an Australian online book shop. You are right, large parts of Australia should have a similar climate.
And buy the way… I ordered this one:
Gardening In The Tropics: The Definitive Guide for Gardeners
But it’s based on a more wet climate…
This message was edited Jan 1, 2011 1:59 PM
Just discovered a site today that I have not had a good look at yet......you might want to check it out.
tropicalpermaculture.com
I think you'll have difficulty trying to get books specifically for your climate. The unfortunate thing is most books on tropics are either written by people in the wet tropics, or who aren't even in the tropics but like to consider themselves "subtropical". Even Bill Mollison, "father of permaculture" was from Tasmania (very cold by Australian standards) and moved into the "hippy area" of northern New South Wales which felt tropical to him.
I looked up Zambia, apparently a lot of it is fairly high altitude (we're lowland here) a bit further from the equator than where I am but with a similar seasonal pattern. We have the dry and wet season, with a transition between them.
Our agricultural people put out a lot of Fact Sheets on growing plants in this climate. You can access them online as PDFs. Go to the website and click on the drop down menues near the top of the page. Then just pick the topics you want from there:
http://www.nt.gov.au/d/publications/
That should give you a lot of information for growing in a climate closest to yours. The site mentioned by Stellamarina should be good, the climate it's based on would also be similar to yours, although not at the same altitude.
Yes, you are right. We are at about 1250 meters above sea level (thank god;-) and this makes a big difference. Frost is very rare and so are temperatures above 35 Celsius.
Thanks again for the link. This one was certainly full of information.