I'm located in Canada — zone 4b, I believe.  I've been looking for one or two permaculture/forest garden books to get me started in the right direction and to serve as reference material, but I've been hearing that a lot of the popular ones (see list at the end) are geared toward climates in the UK.  Does that make them useless to me, or will there still be important things that transfer to my local climate?

I don't want to spend money on reading material only to find that most of the information doesn't apply to me.  I know there's loads of information online, but sometimes just having some good guides in print gives you something the Internet can't.

Some popular books I've heard about:

[li]Creating a Forest Garden by Martin Crawford[/li]
[li]Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke[/li]
[li]How to Make a Forest Garden by Patrick Whitefield[/li]

You should have a farm solely devoted to rhubarb and ostrich fern, they're both zone 1 hardy! haha


In all seriousness I definitely recommend edible forest gardens, it is not written for canadian climates, but more for zone 6. Most of the literature applies still to zone 4, and alot of the plant indexes are still useful.  Probably at least a third of the plants they talk about are zone 4 hardy.