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Gardener’s

Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web, Revised Edition

The 2011 Garden Writers of America Gold Award for Best Writing/Book proves soil is anything but an inert substance. Healthy soil is teeming with life — not just earthworms and insects, but a staggering multitude of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms. When we use chemical fertilizers, we injure the microbial life that sustains healthy plants, and thus become increasingly dependent on an arsenal of artificial substances, many of them toxic to humans as well as other forms of life. But there is an alternative to this vicious circle: to garden in a way that strengthens, rather than destroys, the soil food web — the complex world of soil-dwelling organisms whose interactions create a nurturing environment for plants. By eschewing jargon and overly technical language, the authors make the benefits of cultivating the soil food web available to a wide audience, from devotees of organic gardening techniques to weekend gardeners who simply want to grow healthy, vigorous plants without resorting to chemicals.

The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Pest and Disease Control: A Complete Guide to Maintaining a Healthy Garden and Yard the Earth-Friendly Way (Rodale Organic Gardening Books)

With growing consumer awareness about the dangers of garden chemicals, turn to The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Pest and Disease Control (by Fern Bradley) as the most reliable and comprehensive guide on the garden shelf. Rodale has been the category leader in organic methods for decades, and this thoroughly updated edition features the latest science-based recommendations for battling garden problems. With all-new photos of common and recently introduced pests and plant diseases, you can quickly identify whether you’ve discovered garden friend or foe and what action, if any, you should take.No other reference includes a wider range of methods for growing and maintaining an organic garden. The plant-by-plant guide features symptoms and solutions for 200 popular plants, including flowers, vegetables, trees, shrubs, and fruits. The insect-and-disease encyclopedia includes a photo identification guide and detailed descriptions of damage readers may see. The extensive coverage of the most up-to-date organic control techniques and products, presented in order of lowest impact to most intensive intervention, makes it easy to choose the best control. 

Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener’s Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting

Books on container gardening have been wildly popular with urban and suburban readers, but until now, there has been no comprehensive “how-to” guide for growing fresh food in the absence of open land. Fresh Food from Small Spaces fills the gap as a practical, comprehensive, and downright fun guide to growing food in small spaces. It provides readers with the knowledge and skills necessary to produce their own fresh vegetables, mushrooms, sprouts, and fermented foods as well as to raise bees and chickens—all without reliance on energy-intensive systems like indoor lighting and hydroponics. Readers will learn how to transform their balconies and windowsills into productive vegetable gardens, their countertops and storage lockers into commercial-quality sprout and mushroom farms, and their outside nooks and crannies into whatever they can imagine, including sustainable nurseries for honeybees and chickens. Free space for the city gardener might be no more than a cramped patio, balcony, rooftop, windowsill, hanging rafter, dark cabinet, garage, or storage area, but no space is too small or too dark to raise food. With this book as a guide, people living in apartments, condominiums, townhouses, and single-family homes will be able to grow up to 20 percent of their own fresh food using a combination of traditional gardening methods and space-saving techniques such as reflected lighting and container “terracing.” Those with access to yards can produce even more. Author R. J. Ruppenthal worked on an organic vegetable farm in his youth, but his expertise in urban and indoor gardening has been hard-won through years of trial-and-error experience. In the small city homes where he has lived, often with no more than a balcony, windowsill, and countertop for gardening, Ruppenthal and his family have been able to eat at least some homegrown food 365 days per year. In an era of declining resources and environmental disruption, Ruppenthal shows that even urban dwellers can contribute to a rebirth of local, fresh foods.

The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible

The invaluable resource for home food gardeners! Ed Smith’s W-O-R-D system has helped countless gardeners grow an abundance of vegetables and herbs. And those tomatoes and zucchini and basil and cucumbers have nourished countless families, neighbors, and friends with delicious, fresh produce. The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible is essential reading for locavores in every corner of North America!Everything you loved about the first edition of The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible is still here: friendly, accessible language; full-color photography; comprehensive vegetable specific information in the A-to-Z section; ahead-of-its-time commitment to organic methods; and much more.Now, Ed Smith is back with a 10th Anniversary Edition for the next generation of vegetable gardeners. New to this edition is coverage of 15 additional vegetables, including an expanded section on salad greens and more European and Asian vegetables. Readers will also find growing information on more fruits and herbs, new cultivar photographs in many vegetable entries, and a much-requested section on extending the season into the winter months. No matter how cold the climate, growers can bring herbs indoors and keep hardy greens alive in cold frames or hoop houses. The impulse to grow vegetables is even stronger in 2009 than it was in 2000, when Storey published The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible. The financial and environmental costs of fossil fuels raise urgent questions: How far should we be shipping food? What are the health costs of petroleum-based pesticides and herbicides? Do we have to rely on megafarms that use gasoline-powered machinery to grow and harvest crops? With every difficult question, more people think, “Maybe I should grow a few vegetables of my own.” This book will continue to answer all their vegetable gardening questions. Praise for the First Edition:”In every small town, there is a vegetable garden that people go out of the way to walk past. Smith is the guy who grew that garden.” — Verlyn Klinkenborg, The New York Times Book Review”An abundance of photographs . . . visually bolster the techniques described, while frequent subheads, sidebars, and information-packed photo captions make the layout user-friendly . . . [Smith’s] book is thorough and infused with practical wisdom and a dry Vermont humor that should endear him to readers.” — Publisher’s Weekly”Smith . . . clearly explains everything novice and experienced gardeners need to know to grow vegetables and herbs. . . . ” — Library Journal”this book will answer all your questions as well as put you on the path to an abundant harvest. As a bonus, anecdotes and stories make this informative book fun to read.” – New York Newsday

The Gardener’s A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food

Before it was a book, The Gardener’s A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food was organic gardener Tanya L. K. Denckla’s highly prized personal database, the distillation of years of careful research and hands-on, real-life, dirt-under-the-fingernails experience in growing her own vegetables, herbs, fruits, and nuts. Now available to all, this easy-to-read sourcebook offers much to gardeners of all skill levels, answering questions quickly and authoritatively so more time can be spent enjoying the garden. Six comprehensive chapters cover vegetables, fruits and nuts, herbs, organic remedies, and allies and companions. Within each chapter plants are arranged alphabetically, making needed information eminently accessible. Individual plant entries provide specific information on planting; temperature; soil and water needs; measurements; seed-starting dates; pests, diseases, allies, companions, and incompatibles, as applicable; when to harvest; how to store produce; and overviews of selected varieties. Fully half of the book is dedicated to organic remedies that can prevent or combat plant diseases and garden pests. Hundreds of common diseases and pests are discussed, as well as which plants are likely to be affected, how to recognize the problem, and tried-and-true natural remedies. The Gardener’s A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food demystifies how to work collaboratively with the complex natural systems of the environment, making gardening a little easier and definitely more fun.

The Vegetable Gardener’s Container Bible: How to Grow a Bounty of Food in Pots, Tubs, and Other Containers

By growing vegetables in containers, even novice gardeners can reap a bounty of organic food in very small spaces. Anyone can harvest tomatoes on a patio, produce a pumpkin in a planter, or grow broccoli on a balcony — it’s easy! Ed Smith shows you how to choose the right plants, select containers and tools, care for plants throughout the growing season, control pests without chemicals, and much more. He even includes plans for small-space container gardens that are perfect for urban and suburban gardeners.

The New Organic Grower: A Master’s Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener, 2nd Edition (A Gardener’s Supply Book)

With more than 45,000 sold since 1988, The New Organic Grower has become a modern classic. In this newly revised and expanded edition, master grower Eliot Coleman continues to present the simplest and most sustainable ways of growing top-quality organic vegetables. Coleman updates practical information on marketing the harvest, on small-scale equipment, and on farming and gardening for the long-term health of the soil. The new book is thoroughly updated, and includes all-new chapters such as: Farm-Generated Fertility—how to meet your soil-fertility needs from the resources of your own land, even if manure is not available. The Moveable Feast—how to construct home-garden and commercial-scale greenhouses that can be easily moved to benefit plants and avoid insect and disease build-up. The Winter Garden—how to plant, harvest, and sell hardy salad crops all winter long from unheated or minimally heated greenhouses. Pests—how to find “plant-positive” rather than “pest-negative” solutions by growing healthy, naturally resistant plants. The Information Resource—how and where to learn what you need to know to grow delicious organic vegetables, no matter where you live. Written for the serious gardener or small market farmer, The New Organic Grower proves that, in terms of both efficiency and profitability, smaller can be better.