Best-selling gardening author Barbara Pleasant makes organic vegetable gardening easy, fun, and rewarding with detailed planting and care designs for 24 beginner-friendly gardens to fit any site, whether it's a tiny side yard, a border, a trellis alongside the house, or a front yard. From exactly what plants (and how many) to buy, where and when to plant them, and how to care for each vegetable throughout the season, Pleasant encourages readers to start small, grow the food they love, and expand their plant selection as their skills develop. Specially tailored plans offer choices to fit a wide range of sites and food preferences, from the Front-Yard Food Supply to the Marinara Medley, Sweet Corn & Company, and High-Value Verticals.There's a plan and plant selection to fit every gardener's passion. Detailed plot plans show progressive stages for how each garden can be expanded gradually over the course of three years, ensuring that beginning gardeners will experience success and satisfaction without being overwhelmed by an over-ambitious plan at the start.

Become a Skilled Doctor of Plant Care!

This easy-to-use reference fully explains more than 50 of the most common plant diseases -- where they occur, what they look like, what to do about them, and the long-term prognosis for the affected plants. Most important, gardening expert Barbara Pleasant recommends proven organic methods for controlling each disease.

The Gardener's Guide to Plant Diseases features:

-- Informal encyclopedia style, making information and answers very easy to find.

-- Illustrations that show the techniques for distinguishing between look-alike symptoms of different diseases.

-- Cross-referenced list of common vegetables and fruits and the diseases most apt to affect them.

-- Loads of facts on symptoms and tips for detecting diseases (including those diseases that are often too small to see).

-- Simple, inexpensive organic treatments to halt the spread of each disease and prevent its recurrence.

Barbara Pleasant and Deborah L. Martin turn the compost bin upside down with their liberating system of keeping compost heaps right in the garden, rather than in some dark corner behind the garage. The compost and the plants live together from the beginning in a nourishing, organic environment. The authors' bountiful, compost-rich gardens require less digging, weeding, mulching, and even less planting. And here's one of the best parts -- no more backbreaking slogs from compost bin to garden. The authors even identify the plants that benefit most from compost and how the elements of a composted garden work together.
A natural Six-Way Compost Gardening System provides the ruling principles for successfully improving every garden with healthy compost. Readers will learn how to:
1. Choose labor-saving sites that keep gardens and compost piles as close to one another as possible.
2. Work with the compostable riches produced at home. Every yard and kitchen produces plenty of material -- easily identified with at-a-glance charts -- for a great start.
3. Help composting critters do their work by balancing ingredients, adding high-nitrogen meals when needed, and keeping the compost moist.
4. Reuse recycling bin items, such as large plastic buckets and cardboard boxes, as composting equipment.
5. Keep diversity in the mix. The magic is in the variety of the components and how they work together to create "gardener's gold."
6. Customize composting to suit specific garden needs, always concentrating first on soil care.
Adhering to these guidelines, Pleasant and Martin bring readers on a thorough, informative tour of materials and innovative techniques, leading the way to an efficient and rewarding home gardening system. Their methods are sure to help gardeners turn average vegetable plots into rich incubators of healthy produce, bursting with fresh flavor, and flower beds into rich tapestries of bountiful blooms all season long.

Now that you've mastered gardening basics, you want to enjoy your bounty year-round, right? Homegrown Pantry picks up where beginning gardening books leave off, with in-depth profiles of the 55 most popular crops including beans, beets, squash, tomatoes, and much more -- to keep your pantry stocked throughout the year. In-depth profiles highlight how many plants to grow of each crop for a year's worth of eating, and which storage methods work best for specific varieties. Author Barbara Pleasant culls tips from decades of her own gardening experience and from growers across North America to offer planting, care, and harvesting refreshers for every region and each vegetable.