Miraculous Abundance

Perrine Hervé-Gruyer has worked as an international lawyer and head of the legal department of a major company in Asia, and has volunteered with the High Commissioner for Refugees. When she turned thirty, Perrine radically changed lanes, and began taking courses in psychotherapy, specifically in relaxation therapy, publishing a book titled La Relaxation en Famille. With her husband, Charles, she created Le Ferme du Bec Hellouin. Perrine also serves as a Green Party representative with the Regional Parliament of Haute-Normandie, where she oversees a committee focusing on agriculture.Charles Hervé-Gruyer has been passionate about the relationship between humans and nature since childhood. He circumnavigated the globe for 22 years while operating a floating school focusing on ecology and indigenous cultures, the subject of many of his books and documentaries. Charles then directed his research to exploring our inner world, studying psychology, relaxation therapy, massage, and yoga instruction. Anxious to explore the most environmentally friendly farming practices, Charles created Le Ferme du Bec Hellouin with his wife, Perrine, in 2003. The couple then began an experiment merging various small-scale, intensive, organic, and natural agricultural techniques that would pique the interest of European agencies planning food-security strategy and raise awareness about permaculture in France. The farm also operates a permaculture school.Eliot Coleman has over fifty years experience in all aspects of organic farming, including field vegetables, greenhouse vegetables, rotational grazing of cattle and sheep, and range poultry. He is the author of The New Organic Grower, Four-Season Harvest, and The Winter Harvest Handbook, as well as the instructional workshop DVD Year-Round Vegetable Production with Eliot Coleman. Coleman and his wife, Barbara Damrosch, presently operate a commercial year-round market garden, in addition to horticultural research projects, at Four Season Farm in Harborside, Maine.

"This book, more about philosophy than a how-to, describes how two inexperienced beginners succeeded in creating a gorgeous, productive, self-sustaining farm on 1000 square meters of land in Normandy—La Ferme du Bec Hellouin….If the color photographs are any indication, the results are magnificent….The mandala garden alone made me want to get on the next plane just to see how it works in controlling weeds. The moral: you could do this at home."--Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics