Food gardening is becoming increasingly popular, as people look for new ways to live more sustainably and minimize harm to the environment. This book addresses the 21st century trends which bring new challenges to food gardening - anthropogenic climate change, environmental degradation, natural resource scarcity, and social inequity - and explains the basic biological, ecological and social concepts needed to understand and respond to them. Examples throughout the text demonstrate how to successfully use these concepts, while supporting gardeners' values, and their goals for themselves, their communities and the world.

Best practices for the eight most profitable crops Today only a few dozen large-scale producers dominate the greenhouse produce market. Why? Because they know and employ best practices for the most profitable crops: tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, peppers, leafy greens, lettuce, herbs, and microgreens. The Greenhouse and Hoophouse Grower's Handbook levels the playing field by revealing these practices so that all growers-large and small-can maximize the potential of their protected growing space. Whether growing in a heated greenhouse or unheated hoophouse, this book offers a decision-making framework for how to best manage crops that goes beyond a list of simple do's and don'ts. As senior trial technician for greenhouse crops at Johnny's Selected Seeds, author Andrew Mefferd spent seven years consulting for growers using protected agriculture in a wide variety of climates, soils, and conditions. The Greenhouse and Hoophouse Grower's Handbook brings his experience and expertise to bear in an in-depth guide that will help readers make their investment in greenhouse space worthwhile. Every year, more growers are turning to protected culture to deal with unpredictable weather and to meet out-of-season demand for local food, but many end up spinning their wheels, wasting time and money on unprofitable crops grown in ways that don't make the most of their precious greenhouse space. With comprehensive chapters on temperature control and crop steering, pruning and trellising, grafting, and more, Mefferd's book is full of techniques and strategies that can help farms stay profitable, satisfy customers, and become an integral part of re-localizing our food system. From seed to sale, The Greenhouse and Hoophouse Grower's Handbook is the indispensable resource for protected growing.

This is a concise calendar of practical tasks, covering all aspects of flower, kitchen and greenhouse gardening throughout all four seasons of the year. You can master a range of new gardening skills, with simple, illustrated step-by-step instructions. It includes suggestions for creative projects, as well as essential tasks to keep your garden looking good. It features a useful glossary of terms, and quick reference charts indicating what to do when in the garden. This practical handbook takes the guesswork out of knowing what to do when in the garden, right through the year. It gives advice on preparing the ground, sowing, planting and caring for plants, and harvesting fruit and vegetables, from early spring to late summer and into winter. Basic maintenance tasks are included, together with brilliant ideas for creative projects such as planting up a pretty hanging basket, making the most of summer bulbs in a mixed border, and which plants will extend the season. Illustrated with step-by-step techniques and packed with expert gardening tips, this book is an essential companion for every garden enthusiast.

The Brown Goose, the White Case Knife, Ora's Speckled Bean, Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter -- these are just a few of the heirloom fruits and vegetables you'll encounter in Bill Best's remarkable history of seed saving and the people who preserve both unique flavors and the Appalachian culture associated with them. As one of the people at the forefront of seed saving and trading for over fifty years, Best has helped preserve numerous varieties of beans, tomatoes, corn, squashes, and other fruits and vegetables, along with the family stories and experiences that are a fundamental part of this world. While corporate agriculture privileges a few flavorless but hardy varieties of daily vegetables, seed savers have worked tirelessly to preserve genetic diversity and the flavors rooted in the Southern Appalachian Mountains -- referred to by plant scientists as one of the vegetative wonders of the world.
"Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste" will introduce readers to the cultural traditions associated with seed saving, as well as the remarkable people who have used grafting practices and hand-by-hand trading to keep alive varieties that would otherwise have been lost. As local efforts to preserve heirloom seeds have become part of a growing national food movement, Appalachian seed savers play a crucial role in providing alternatives to large-scale agriculture and corporate food culture. Part flavor guide, part people's history, "Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste" will introduce you to a world you've never known -- or perhaps remind you of one you remember well from your childhood.

An Avant Garde(ning) Book From street gardens in Los Angeles to grand country estates in Australia, The Planthunter is a visceral and immersive exploration of the exceptional and ordinary ways people around the world find purpose and connection through the act of gardening. All the featured gardeners are committed to the cultivation of the earth and the human spirit. They're landscape architects, artists, garden designers, plant collectors, wanderers, big thinkers, florists, and writers. The Planthunter is for the plant curious, the plant killer, the plant lover, and everyone in between. Jam-packed with soulful stories and hundreds of eye-opening photographs, this must-read will inspire contemplation, curiosity, care, and action.

Weeds are botanical thugs, but they have always been essential to our lives. They were the first crops and medicines and they inspired Velcro. They adorn weddings and foliate the most derelict urban sites. With the verve and historical breadth of Michael Pollan, acclaimed nature writer Richard Mabey delivers a provocative defense of the plants we love to hate.

For over 40 years Judy Cuppaidge travelled the Pacific to paint rare, beautiful and exotic flowers before the oblivion of civilisation. In this book, 32 of her exquisitely painted flowers are lovingly depicted together with their stories of discovery, chance and mischance from her travel diaries, delightfully told in her own inimitable style. Each painting is the productive of intensive work and painstaking effort, sometimes uniquely layering five applications of water colouring to obtain just the right nuance and shade.

#1 New Release in Philosophy, Consciousness & Thought, and Tropical Climate Gardening A Garden View of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the SeaDuring a tropical storm. In the aftermath of chemotherapy. In the midst of marital discord. These are among the times author Charlene Costanzo found comfort, joy, hope, and healing on Sanibel Island. Now, comes a collection of insightful life-guiding reflections inspired by the tropical botanicals of one of Florida's most precious flower gardens. Life lessons and line art in the tropics. In the tradition of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Charlene finds awe in the bounty of sea shells along the Florida shoreline. But, it's the foliage in Sanibel's botanical garden that brings daily reflections and lesson-bearing messages. Translating the beauty of botany. If you look closely, plants sprout with willpower and bloom with determination. Drawing from the beautiful nature of trees and flowers, Charlene crafts garden-inspired messages from her experiences with healing and understanding. Inside, find quotes, reflections, and bonus material like: Pen-and-ink line drawings with illustrations of flowers, leaves, and garden plants Charlene's Twelve Gifts resource and how they apply to the lessons learned in the garden An epilogue from two other locales Sedona, Arizona and St. John, Virgin Islands Perfect garden gift or beach gift. Whether you're exploring the secret life of trees or the beauty of a cut flower garden, this environmentalist memoir is a great addition to any shelf of nature books. A combination of garden books and meditation books, Twelve Gifts from the Garden is both an ode to ecology and a collection of healing, discoveries, and epiphanies. Some pieces provide comfort, some support strength and courage-but all offer a relaxing gift for women. If you're looking for Anne Lamott books, gardener gifts, or inspirational gifts for women-or enjoyed bestsellers like Braiding Sweetgrass or The Hidden Life of Trees-then Twelve Gifts from the Garden is your next read!

Planning and maintaining a successful garden is an enjoyable and creative process. If you dream of borders of bright and scented blooms, a healthy green lawn, a patio in which to relax, or even low-maintenance ideas to lessen the workload, here are the skills to guarantee success. There are plenty of tips to incorporate aromatic shrubs and architectural plants into your garden, as well as ideas for filling space with annuals. Schemes for attractive hanging baskets and window boxes are also included. With over 1200 photographs illustrating both techniques and beautiful gardens, the book contains everything you need to create a stunning outdoor area.

A Guide to what not to do in your garden. Gardening is widely regarded as one of life's great joys. However, you might not feel that way if you pay too much attention to the experts: every garden magazine and newspaper relentlessly publishes hectoring instructions telling you what you must do in your garden this week or this month, to the point where your garden can become a source of constant stress or wasted energy. Rather than add to the pile of suggested drudgery, this book is instead dedicated to relieving you of pointless and unnecessary garden work, and suggests easy and pleasant ways to look after your little patch of paradise.

Creating a beautiful outdoor space in under an hour a week. You can create a stunning garden that is quick to establish, and can be maintained in under an hour a week. It includes practical advice on using time-saving equipment and techniques for maximum effort in minimum time. It features inspiration for five easy-care gardens to suit your taste in design. It includes a useful chart of simple-to-grow plants, showing their individual cultivation requirements. It is perfect for every weekend gardener who wants to spend time enjoying their garden rather than working on it. Sections include easy garden maintenance, easy-care gardens, low-maintenance landscaping, low-maintenance plants, ideas for special features, easy-care plants and the common names of plants. If you long for a beautiful garden but have limited time to create and care for one, here is a quick and handy guide that will show you how to create the garden of your dreams with minimum effort. The book explains how careful planning, design and planting will ensure trouble-free gardening in the future and gives lots of useful information on the best equipment and techniques. There are recommendations for easy plants that require very little aftercare, as well as inspiration for five garden styles, and shortcuts to create usually time-consuming special features. With its wealth of invaluable advice, this is the ideal sourcebook for the time-pressed garden lover.

This book is a primer for those wanting to grow their own food while maintaining a consciousness of the water security issues in Southern California. After having spent a number of years looking for plants that provide food without needing extra water (or excessive water) in Southern California I decided that there needs to be one place to look for others to find the same information I have gathered over the years. After searching for some time, I have not been able to find a comprehensive document like this one that lists and describes culinary plants with the Mediterranean Climate and its low annual precipitation in mind. Be warned, this is not a large book, it is only 44 pages and only includes about 34 plants.

In this gardening classic the forever adventurous Christopher Lloyd takes us on a tour through the garden, stopping to lecture here, to exhort there, to overturn the old and accepted when his experience prompts him. He ponders, suggests, explains, ruminates, always delighting the reader with the sharpness of his observations and the eloquence of his prose. For Christopher Lloyd gardening is nothing if not fun, and he makes it equally enjoyable for his readers.

Redwoods and Roses explores the special relationship California's diverse peoples have shared with nature and the unique gardens and landscapes they have created over the years to nurture and enhance those bonds. From pre-colonial times to the Victorian era, California gardening expert Maureen Gilmer brings this garden history to life, showing how the gardens and landscapes were created and profiling the heirloom plants within them. But Redwoods and Roses is more than a book on gardening history. Here, the reader will discover how to recreate period designs in her own garden, from making a no-fuss adobe-look wall from the Mission era to finding heirloom plants for a cottage garden. Redwoods and Roses is a blend of natural history, California history, plants profiles, landscaping tips, and sensible garden advice, as well as an eloquent plea for the preservation of many remarkable plants.

The British have always been a nation of gardeners. Our gardening history began even before the Romans, who brought Mediterranean plants which still flourish across Britain. Gardening grew in the sixteenth century and a distinctively British style became a major export in the eighteenth century. Today, the annual Chelsea Flower Show is an international festival, and our garden designers are in demand all over the world. This book traces the history of British gardening over 450 years through the stories of twenty-six key figures, showing what drove them, and their role in the evolution of Britain's gardens. Their work reveals changes in taste and society down the centuries. Familiar names are featured, such as 'Capability' Brown, Humphry Repton, Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West and Christopher Lloyd, together with less generally known figures such as John Gerard, whose Herballof 1597 inspired generations of plantsmen, the Tradescants, pioneer plant hunters, and J. C. Loudon, nineteenth-century champion of smaller gardens. In the present day, we meet Beth Chatto, advocate of the right plant in the right place, and John Brookes, who did for gardening what Elizabeth David did for cooking. Their achievements provide a colourful history and inspiration to every gardening enthusiast.

'Beth Lynch's subtle and moving book is about the heart-work of finding and making a place for oneself in the world; the effort of putting down roots, the pain of tearing them up again, and how one grows to know another person or another landscape. Horticulture and human feelings twine together here - and what flourishes in the several gardens of this book is, in the end, hope' ROBERT MACFARLANE 'I loved Beth Lynch's tender, wise meditation on grief, home, and the restorative magic of making a garden' OLIVIA LAING Out of place and lonely after a relocation to Switzerland, Beth Lynch realises that she needs to get her hands dirty if she is to put down roots. And so she sets about making herself at home in the way she knows best - by tending a garden, growing things. The search for a garden takes her across the country, through meadows and on mountain paths where familiar garden plants run wild, to the rugged hills of the Swiss Jura where she begins to plant her paradise. WHERE THE HORNBEAM GROWS is a memoir about carrying a garden inwardly through loss, dislocation and relocation, about finding a sense of wellbeing in a green place of one's own, and about the limits of paradise in a peopled world. It is a powerful exploration of how, in nurturing a corner of the natural world, we ourselves are nurtured.

With an estimated 25,000 different types existing naturally, the orchid family is not only the largest but also one of the most diverse plant flowering families in the world. Since ancient time orchids have been associated with love, luxury and beauty. They have been considered aphrodisiac and medicinal. Although orchids are commonly thought of as tropical flowers, they grow naturally in almost all climates. This guide provides the necessary knowledge to become a successful orchid grower and to enjoy the great pleasures these plants bring into your life and your home.

The Gardeners' Book of Days brings together gardening tips, historical gardeners, plant information, and the world's most loved gardens, organised into daily readings for the whole year. It covers propagation of hellebores, how to make a tussie mussie, the best time of year to visit the gardens of Capri and where to find a Jacaranda Queen. Holly Kerr Forsyth has travelled the world and its gardens and in this ""Gardeners' Book of Days"" she offers some of the advice and information she has garnered along the way. Australian gardens and gardening festivals are discussed, as well as those found further afield. There is seasonal advice for vegetable and flower growers, recipes using garden produce and many other garden- and plant-related tidbits. Illustrated throughout with Holly's beautiful photographs, this book is a perfect companion to the gardening year. Offering unusual and timely snippets of information and advice, this book is a celebration of all things to do with gardening, and will be welcomed by gardeners and garden lovers alike.