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.

- A manual for healing the earth and creating sustainable forests through mushroom cultivation, featuring mycelial solutions to water pollution, toxic spills, and other ecological challenges.- Mycotechnology is part of a larger trend toward using living systems to solve environmental problems and to restore ecosystems.- Includes mycological projects for children (and kids at heart).- More than 50 full-color photographs of mushrooms, mycelium, mycotechnology in action, growing techniques, and so on.- Provides detailed how-tos for growing gourmet and medicinal mushrooms--allies to the immune systems of both humans and our planet. Topics include techniques for germinating spares, transplanting wild mycelium, and creating natural spawn.

Soil is the basis not only for all gardening, but for all terrestrial life. No aspect of agriculture is more fundamental and important, yet we have been losing vast quantities of our finite soil resources to erosion, pollution, and development. Now back in print, this eminently sensible and wonderfully well-focused book provides essential information about one of the most significant challenges for those attempting to grow delicious organic vegetables: the creation and maintenance of healthy soil. Chapter 2, "Understanding the Soil System," is alone worth the price of admission. Gershuny and Smillie give lay readers and experts a clear explanation of subjects--soil life and nutrient cycles--that have confounded most authors. Nowhere will the reader find simpler and more coherent descriptions of key concepts including cation exchange capacity and chelation. There are other books about soil available, including Grace Gershuny's comprehensive Start with the Soil, and there are books that feature chapters on soil building. What distinguishes The Soil of Soilis the authors' concise presentation; they give readers important information, including technical essentials, without getting bogged down in scientific or quasiscientific mumbo-jumbo. In addition, useful tables list specific compost materials, green manures, and other resources that allow growers to translate into action the more general information provided by the book. The soil-building techniques featured include: Organic matter management Building and maintaining humus On-site composting Green manures and rotations Cultivation and weed control Nutrient balances and soil testing Using mineral fertilizers Planning for organic certification Updates to the 1999 edition include analysis of Proposed Rules for the National Organic Standards, and expanded recommendations for private testing services and soil-testing equipment for home gardeners and organic farmers. All of us involved in the cultivation of plants--from the backyard gardener to the largest farmer--need to help regenerate a "living soil," for only in the diversity of the soil and its creatures can we ensure the long-term health of ourselves and our environment. The Soul of Soil offers everyone a basic understanding of what soil is and what we can do to improve our own patch of it. Seen in this light, this practical handbook will be an inspiration as well.

Principles of Tropical Horticulture leads the reader through a background of environmental influences and plant physiology to an understanding of production and post-harvest systems, environmental adaptation techniques and marketing strategies. Focusing on the principles behind production practices and their scientific basis, rather than detailed biological traits of each crop, this text outlines successes and failures in practices to date and sets out how the quantity and quality of horticultural produce can improve in the future. Case studies are frequently used and chapters cover the production of vegetables, fruit and ornamental crops, including temperate zone crops adapted to grow in the tropics.

Tending our gardens is a lifelong pleasure. As we age, our energy and physical abilities become more limited. But gardens are magical, evolving places, with the potential to keep us young at heart, physically fit, out in the fresh air and full to the brim with joy and expectation. This ground-breaking book shows how easy it is for older people to carry on gardening. The different kinds of garden set-up are considered first, along with planning decisions and how best to keep safe and comfortable. An informative chapter looks at the main gardening activities and appropriate equipment, especially those that answer physical limitations. Different styles of garden are then presented: flower, vegetable, fruit, raised, herb, patio, vertical and indoor gardens, each one including projects and techniques, from building a raised bed to growing potatoes in containers. The final chapter is a directory that profiles the many planting choices available. Packed with projects, garden plans and step-by-step sequences designed for older gardeners who may not be able to exert themselves in the same way as they once could, this will appeal to active gardeners in their early retirement through to seniors with more limited abilities, and show how gardening can be a lifelong pleasure.

Reverence takes on a new meaning in this original memoir of an avid gardener walking the Camino de Santiago. The Camino de Santiago has been a journey for pilgrims for more than 1,000 years, testing-to varying degrees-their spirit, faith, and physical endurance. Lyndon Penner's attention lies elsewhere. A renowned gardener and lover of literature, he revels in the plants, trees, and flowers that tell the history of the people and ecology of northern Spain. Brimming with wry observations-of nature, himself, and other pilgrims on the road- The Way of the Gardener reveals the beauty and the darkness of the human condition while underscoring the deeply fascinating nature of nature itself. This textured work makes for perfect armchair-or garden-reading.