Click on the books below to read extracts, ideas and recipes -
The Best of Jackie French: a practical guide to everything from aphids to zuchinni chocolate cake (Harper Collins September 2000)
This fairly massive book gives you everything from recipes for cleaning products and the body beautiful to pest control advice for indoors and outdoors. But it's mostly about useful plants- fruit, veg, herbs, flowers and trees, how to keep them flourishing and what to do with them.
The Wilderness Garden (Aird Books 1993 $A16.95)
A radical new view of Australian growing methods
Household Self Sufficiency (Aird Books 1994 $A16.95)
Backyard Self Sufficiency (Aird Books 1993 $A14.95)
Switch! - a book of home made power, water and garbage systems
(Aird Books 1994 with Bryan Sullivan $A14.95)
The Ultimate Household Handbook (Aird Books 1994 $A14.95)
This is the third of a set of five complementary books. The first is 'Backyard Self Sufficiency (Aird books, $14.95). This tells you how to grow everything - from olive oil to porridge oats and year round tomatoes - in your backyard.
Then second is Switch! - a book of home made power, water and garbage systems $14.95 Austrlian (1994 with Bryan Sullivan, Aird Books) which describes home made power, water, sewerage and garbage systems. The fourth will come out in 1995 and is a book of harvests - how to make your own chocolate, mulberry wine, dried potatoes, ginger plums, dehydrated zucchini and the fifth will be a book on building alternatives.
Hopefully with all five books you'll be able to make ANYTHING... if you decide you really want to and if you don't ... well at least you'll have the knowledge for an emergency ... or to fantasise instead.
The Organic Garden Problem Solver (Harper Collins 1994 )
Organic Control of Household Pests (Aird Books 1993 $A13.95)
Organic Control of Common Weeds (Aird Books 1993, revised edition 1997 )
A to Z of Useful Plants (Aird Books 1993 )
New Plants from Old (Aird Books 1994 )
How to grow plants from seed, borrow cuttings, plant the stuff you buy in supermarkets and turn it into a garden.
The Books of Thyme, Mint, Lavender, Rosemary, Parley, Basil, Chilli and Garlic (Harper Collins 1994) . . . may be out of print
Jackie French's Guide to Companion Planting in Australia and New Zealand (Aird Books $A10.95)
The Chook Book (Aird Books 1993 $A13.95)
The Salad Garden
(1993 Text publishing but bought by Reed Books...so who knows what's happened to it! It seems to have got lost in the system..and anyone I speak to at Reed promises to find out..but never get back to me. (If anyone at Reed books reads this....it would be a lovely generous thing to do to at least answer some of my enquiries!)
Top Ten Veg (Aird Books 1995 )
Soil Food - 3,764 ways to feed your garden (Aird Books 1995 $A16.95)
Plants That Never say Die (Lothian Books 1995 $A12.95)
The Pumpkin Book (Aird Books 1996 )
Growing Flowers Naturally (Aird Books $A19.95)
Making Money From Your Garden (Earthgarden 1997 $A9.95)
Jackie French's Household Herbal (Earthgarden 1998 $A9.95)
This is a book about my favourite herbs and favourite herbal products. I wish it could have been twenty times as long (no, make that forty). But that would have made it expensive ...
So this is a compromise. I'm sorry if I've left out your favourites or stopped talking about a subject just as you were getting interested. Hopefully, this book will stimulate you to read more about herbs, plant more herbs, love and be lavish with herbs.
Herbs find their way into every part of our lives here. Their use, their sheer generosity - are my passion. I hope I've communicated just a bit of that to you.
How to Guzzle Your Garden (Harper Collins 1999)
When I was a kid I hated gardening. Gardening was all about holding the hose over the gerberas on Sunday afternoon when I'd rather have been doing something much more interesting.
Then I discovered gardens you could eat...
This book tells you about all sorts of things to grow and munch on, from how to turn your school into something you can eat to growing parsley in your joggers or potatoes in a bucket or making wattle pikelets. Shortlisted for the Eve Powell Information Book Award 2000
Seasons of Content (Harper Collins 1997)
This is perhaps my best loved book. It's about a year in the valley- the people, the wombats, the peaches and the recipes, from lovely stinky hand lotion from the garden to peaches in champagne....stories and potions that mooch along together. It's written for adults, but older kids enjoy it too.
Natural Solutions (1999 Women's Weekly Home Library)