Gardening Books

The New Self Sufficient Gardener

by John Seymour

I have the original version of this book, and it's one of the first books I'd carry along with me, if I knew in advance I'd be deserted on some island.  Written for folks who are trying to raise most if not all of their own produce, it contains a very good mix of gardening methods, plant descriptions and planning tools.  He's one of the only authors I've ever read who shows you how to work with the so-called "hungry season", namely early spring when the cupboards are bare but the garden isn't yet producing at full tilt.  He'll show you how to start early, keep going through the heat of summer and get the last bit of production out of your garden well after everyone else has harvested their last produce for the year.

How To Grow More Vegetables, 9th Edition

by John Jeavons

This book is another one of my treasures.  It goes into great length talking about the many merits of double-digging and forming raised beds.  It also includes extensive information not only on the standard vegetables grown in gardens, but also forage and fodder crops, grain crops, fruits, nuts, berries and fiber crops for those folks who really need a lot from their gardens.  Best of all, it provides a lot of planning information so that you can lay out your garden activities schedule well in advance, and pace yourself accordingly.  Finally, it gives harvest information for all those crops based on your experience, ie, beginner, average and advanced gardener.  I found this helpful to get started with reasonable expectations, while aiming for year-to-year improvements.

The Four Season Harvest

by Eliot Coleman

If I had to pick my top three gardening books, this would be the third (the above two would be the others).  Eliot Coleman has extensive gardening experience in less-than-generous New England conditions, and he's done a lot of work figuring out how to squeeze production out of all four seasons.  He also draws extensively from traditional European methods which were common back when transportation was expensive and produce was grown as close to market as possible.  He takes coolhouse production to a whole new level, and shows you how to coax fresh produce out of seemingly impossible growing conditions.

Square Foot Gardening

by Mel Bartholomew

Square foot gardening is a wonderful approach for either home gardeners or small-scale farmers. The concept is amazingly simple - instead of thinking in terms of rows, think in terms of square footage. Each plant, large or small, uses a predictable amount of square footage for its topside growth and root mass. When growers know that preferred spacing, we can set up planting beds almost anywhere to grow almost anything. Mel Bartholomew has worked out how much space veggies need, and how to set up blocks of veggies next to each other to make the most of whatever growing area you might have. This approach isn't quite the same as double-dig planting as described in either Self Sufficient Gardener or How To Grow More Vegetables, but this approach dovetails very well with that method. We have used square foot gardening planting arrangements in double-dug beds with extremely good results. Even as we have grown in scale such that we don't double-dig all our beds every year, we still use the square foot gardening approach in our production beds. If you have limited space, this gardening book is even more valuable because it will help you mix and match what you want to grow, in whatever space you have. Now that's a powerful combination.

Lasagna Gardening

by Patricia Lanza

Lasagna gardening is another fabulous concept, where the author has figured out a way to make veggie growing a whole lot easier. As the title implies, she has developed an approach that uses layers to create the ideal gardening soil. But where most books would tell you to dig deeper, she advocates piling it higher - piling up one layer after another of natural materials such as leaves, compost, sawdust, woodchips, grass clippings, newspaper or cardboard, even shredded paper. Whatever combination of high-nitrogen and high-carbon materials that the grower has easy, inexpensive access to using. The goal here is to create something of a living, breathing, planted compost pile. The pile never heats up as much as a regular compost pile would, because it doesn't have the minimum volume required. But the roots spread through that mass and gleefully take up all the nutrients they need to support the plant. Over time, that pile matures and changes into the soils which we all wish we'd been blessed with from the start. But as the author happily points out, we didn't break our back digging to make it that way. This gardening book is definitely applicable for home gardeners, who can have the garden of their dreams even if they start with sterile hardpan. Oddly enough it also has relevance for commercial growers who can benefit just as much as smaller scale growers. On a commercial scale, this approach may well work out to be competitively priced, compared to the more conventional costs of tillage, fertilization, and cultivation practices. This particular gardening book is definitely worth a read, and its methods are worth at least some experimentation on your own place.

Raised Bed Gardening for Beginners

by Tammy Wylie

Raised beds change the game, in many ways.  They make a lot of garden tasks easier, because they raise the growing surface closer to us.  They elevate the soil above the surrounding area, which allows it to warm up and dry out sooner in spring and stay warm and dry later into the fall.  They encourage us to walk around them rather than across them, which preserves the structure of the soil and avoids compaction.  They encourage root development where we can most easily apply fertilizer and allow us to focus foot traffic on pathways.  They guide hoses around growing plants and make row covers easier to apply and secure.  Last but not least, they help us maximize what goes into a planting bed, to make the most of that precious soil.  Yes, there are a few downfalls as well - they take more work to create and maintain, the sides must be replaced at some point, and soils can get too warm and dry in summer.  Still, they consistently outperform standard growing beds.  We've used raised beds for years and we've seen enough benefits that we'll probably never go back to standard growing techniques except for the biggest plantings of commodity crops.  While other books mention raised beds and some go into a fair amount of depth (no pun intended), this book is devoted to all the pro's and con's of raised beds, and describes how to make the best use of them. Highly recommended if only to create a few experimental raised beds of your own.

Hugelkultur, New and Expanded 2nd Edition

by James Paris

Hugelkultur is a combination of raised bed, lasagna bed, deep mulch system, no-till bed and permaculture, all wrapped up in one.  It is both old and new; a very old system in several traditional farming systems, specifically from the rural mountains of Germany, yet only recently introduced to the rest of Western growers by a handful of people.  James Paris is one of them.  He's a wonderful guide on this topic as he leads the reader through all the different facets of hugelkultur assembly, growth and maintenance.  One of its strengths is the deliberate use of natural materials which might otherwise be discarded as "trash", such as branches, brush and other rough materials.  For those of us with rough, raw land, this can be a wonderful way to create vibrantly active planting areas for almost no cost.

The Vegetable Gardener's Container Bible

by Edward Smith

Container gardening is a wonderful option for folks without fertile soil, or without soil of any kind.  Think patios, decks, porches and driveways.  Containers are also wonderful for those overly-ambitious plants that we love, but which try to take over the world if given half a chance (spearmint and peppermint plants, this is YOU).  Containers are also nice for potatoes, which appreciate new soil each year, and produce more if you keep piling new soil around young stems.  So container gardening can solve a variety of problems and offer growing area where it doesn't normally exist.  However, containers do need higher maintenance and protection.  This book by Edward Smith offers a lot of good been-there-done-that advice to help vegetable growers maximize their options by adding containers to the growing plan.  We use containers here in a number of ways and it has helped us produce more.  Give containers a try and see how many ways you can use them to help your own gardening efforts.

The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book

by Ruth Stout

This is a book about no-till gardening, and so much more.  Ruth Stout has been a gardening writer, and a gardener, for a very long time, and she's found just about every work-saving secret that has ever seen daylight.  She has a lot of wonderful ideas about ways to maximize your time and effort in the garden, so that you can grow produce as efficiently as possible.  For those of us who have too much to do in a day (and seriously, who has enough time for everything?), this book can give us our productivity, and some time/money/energy left at the end of the day.   Now that's a valuable book!

Mini Farming: Self Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre

by Brett L. Markham

I love this book for several reasons.  First, it reminds us that we don't need huge acreage to get a lot of produce.  One of my mentors used to talk about feeding his family on 1/4 acre for 1/4 of a century, and that's exactly what this book teaches folks how to do.  Second, it covers a lot more than simply how to grow vegetables.  It talks about related topics like seed storage, seed planting and seed saving, prepping the soil and building fertility from year to year, how to add small animals like chickens, how to preserve the harvest, and how to sell the bounty.  Third, it's a beautiful book to look through.  A lot of the older gardening texts are just that - text.  This one isn't a coffee table book per se, but it's very easy easy to look at.  When we're trying to wrap our minds arounda  new idea, sometimes an illustration or data table is easier to digest than even a well-written paragraph.  And sometimes at the end of the day, we just want to look at something which is easy on the eye.  This book provides all that.  Highly recommended.

Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food In Hard Times

by Steve Solomon

Steve Solomon is already a well-known name amongst gardeners, having founded Territorial Seed Company in Oregon back in the 1970's. He also wrote Gardening West of the Cascades, to help those of us growers in the Pacific Northwest with our unique growing conditions.  Perhaps most importantly though, he's a long-time homesteader, and he knows the importance of being able to grow food for the table when times are hard.  I felt fortunate when Gardening West of the Cascades came out to help us grow food year in year out.  Now he shares that wisdom with the vast majority of the temperate growing zones.

Gaia's Garden: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture 2nd Edition

by Toby Hemenway

I was introduced to the concepts of permaculture about two decades ago, and it just made so much sense.  Working with Nature rather than against.  Setting up garden and farm layout with stacked production which supported and encouraged everything else, rather than just one thing growing in any given place, fending for itself.  Growing systems which fed the soil rather and left it better with each passing year.  And, last but not least, planning a garden, a farm or a landscape which provided not only food but also forage, living areas and comfortable conditions for whatever creatures were in it.  The books I have read since then were mostly for medium to large scale farms, but this book is specifically for smaller-scale production.  As such it may not have quite as many opportunities to build full-circle systems, but it will give the gardener a lot of ideas about how we can have a multi-layered garden, which provides a lot more than a few vegetables.  Permaculture also helps us think in terms of how to design growing areas which are easy for us to work in.  Nothing like a garden that does a lot of the heavy lifting for us.

Carrots Love Tomatoes: Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening

by Louise Riotte

This was the first book I'm aware of which systematically discussed companion planting, and how to make use of this biological principle in vegetable planting.  This approach does more than stimulate better growth; it helps ward off disease and pests without relying on chemicals to do it.  I started using companion planting at the start of my own gardening career and I did it with this book.  Others have come out since this was first published, and they're good too.  But this is the one I keep coming back to.  My copy now is dog-eared, soil-stained and falling apart along the spine, which is possibly the single best indicator of how valuable it is.  I should probably buy another copy just to have a backup.

Straw Bale Gardens: Complete

by Joel Karsten

A lot of folks don't have access to fertile soil of any kind, whether due to an urban location, contaminated soils, a dry climate or extremely small areas to call their own.  Yet they can still grow at least some vegetables with straw bales.  While straw bales would seem to be sterile, they offer several of the elements that plants need in the root zone - 3 dimensional stability, the ability to hold both air and moisture, a moderate temperature and protection from suppressive weed growth.  While plants also need nutrients which straw bales don't offer, those nutrients can be supplied in other ways.  Straw bales provide all those other properties and make it relatively easy to deliver the rest, which is part of what makes them such good platforms for healthy vegetable growth.  This book will walk the reader through all the different ways to use straw bales for vegetable production, and how to avoid the few problems which might come up.  The book will also describe how to use straw bales in growing areas ranging from deserts to tundra, humid to dry, and in spaces as small as an apartment patio or deck.  Finally, if a gardener loves the idea of using straw bales but can't find the bales themselves, the book will show how to use other organic media in similar ways.  Another good addition to the "how-to" collection.

The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses

by Eliot Coleman

I wanted to include at least one book dedicated to wintertime production options, and at least one book dedicated to greenhouse growing.  This book covers both very nicely.  Eliot Coleman, as already mentioned above, is a wonderful author and grower who has pushed the envelope for how to grow in challenging conditions.  Growing in winter, during the coldest and darkest of conditions, is possibly the most challenging of them all.  He doesn't just talk about commercial production, but rather talks about different tools and techniques which can be combined and sized for use on any operation from micro to commercial.  Better yet, he talks about how to grow under these conditions, without relying upon chemical stimulants, pesticides or herbicides.  You may not end up using all these techniques all the time, but I'd encourage you to try as many of them as possible, and see how far you can extend your own growing season.