Solviva: How to grow $500,000 on one acre, and Peace on Earth

This book is for the person who wants to build an independent house in the boonies at low cost, and wants practical low cost solutions.

It explains how to hook on a solar garden to the house (or separately). How to use animals to provide heat... and CO2 to grow your plants to new heights.

She's from Massachusetts, so her winter solar home works through the cold winters. She's tested this system over more than 10 years.

She explains how to grow salad materials for profit. She shows you the numbers. But I'm not sure how applicable this is to all markets. She's in the upscale area of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.

She explains how to create grey water and black water waste systems that exceed common septic systems. An explanation on one of the many color pictures says: "The Solviva graywater garden: this area, with its thriving roses, dogwood, pines, spruce and grasses has recevied all graywater since my home was COMPLETED IN 1981. OVER THE PAST 17 YEARS these plants have successfully processed over 500 pounds of regular detergents, shampoos and cleaners, and 45 gallons of chlorine bleach."

On the toilets, she has invented a system that uses standard flush toilets that feed a composting system. It's all low tech and easy to build.

She uses grow tubes and growing beds in her greenhouses (attached or separate).

She keeps chickens, rabbits, sheep, and one donkey. All the systems feed each other. It's amazing how she relates the various things on her property.

The amount of goodies she gets out of her small farm(ette) are remarkable.

John D.


A great book   July 3, 2008
Clifford Pastor (Maui, HI)
Solviva is a book everyone should read if they are interested in growing their own food, and to learn other methods to live a sustainable life.


Practical   November 22, 2009
Rebecca Wentworth (Maine)
The suggestions in this book are practical for most people at least on some level. The author shares ideas without a big price tag or hidden secrets you have to buy. Very optimistic.


Sustainability as simple as it gets!   June 23, 2009
Lie^n
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

I had wanted this book for quite awhile and was finally able to buy it for myself. I was not disappointed.

This book 'could' make such positive changes in our society as a whole if only Big Business and their backer, Big Government was not in control.

Recommended for anyone interested in Sustainable Living in every sense of the word.


Viva Solviva   June 23, 2006
Michael McCollum (Madison, WI)
6 out of 14 found this review helpful

Solviva is a fresh and brillant exploration of the complexities involved in constructing a solar home. Anna Edey is beautifully human as she describes her real life adversity in bringing such a complex project into fruition.

Edey is an honest and telling author. She articulates her emotion involved in creating the energy necessary to endeavor so seemingly innocent and simplistic a notion as a house that you sustain and that sustains you as you sustain the Earth.

She vividly describes having to consider the marketing and distribution not to mention profit margins of raising organic restaurant quality garden vegetables and greens within the confines of her modest solar home.

With candor she conveys how interesting ones life becomes while taking on rabbits, chickens, and goats as a part of ones daily life, and indeed, in fact, as co habitants in as much as they too survived within the small solar house and that their presence yielded a profit.

Edey humbly describes discovering each vegetable and green with such surprise and satisfaction and that her vegetables were in fact prize winning and well sought after.

Because of the biproducts of such an efficently contained microecosystem Edey is able to support herself and her lifestyle comfortably within a selfsustaining home. Not without the residual income of the modern associate but with the profit yielded from her ingenius business and gardening method.

Ultimately the complexity of the solar structure itself combined with Edey's originality and genius in housing and growing botanicals within the solar home, in addition to the interactivity of the animals at the house, combine to make a kind of EARTHSHIP that does inevitably produce a profit.