Sunday, May 8, 2011

Dreams of the Garden: Step By Step, Season By Season

The Nonstop Garden
The Nonstop Garden gives gardeners all the information they need to create a productive, beautiful garden from the ground up. This easy-to-use guide is split into four main parts: the nuts and bolts of designing a mixed garden, the garden's main attractions (trees and shrubs), the garden's supporting cast (bulbs, annuals, edibles, and vines), and finishing touches (ornamentation, containers, and garden structures). The Nonstop Garden also includes ten fail-safe design plans that can be incorporated into any garden. Gardeners can choose from a native garden, a scented garden, a gold-colored garden, a garden for wet sites, a vibrant-colored garden, a cool-colored garden, a winter garden, a shade garden, and a design plan for the daunting area known as the hellstrip.

 By following Cohen and Benner's trusted advice and building a nonstop garden, you’ll have more creative planting options, a garden that provides year-round interest, and — most importantly — a yard that requires less maintenance than a traditional perennial border. Building a better, smarter garden has never been so much fun.

 Four-Season Harvest
If you love the joys of eating home-garden vegetables but always thought those joys had to stop at the end of summer, this book is for you. Eliot Coleman introduces the surprising fact that most of the United States has more winter sunshine than the south of France. He shows how North American gardeners can successfully use that sun to raise a wide variety of traditional winter vegetables in backyard cold frames and plastic covered tunnel greenhouses without supplementary heat. Coleman expands upon his own experiences with new ideas learned on a winter-vegetable pilgrimage across the ocean to the acknowledged kingdom of vegetable cuisine, the southern part of France, which lies on the 44th parallel, the same latitude as his farm in Maine.

This story of sunshine, weather patterns, old limitations and expectations, and new realities is delightfully innovative in the best gardening tradition. Four-Season Harvest will have you feasting on fresh produce from your garden all through the winter.

The Complete Kitchen Garden
The Complete Kitchen Garden is an inspiring collection of garden designs and recipes for the home gardener and cook. based on the seasonal cycles of the garden, each chapter provides a new way to look at the planning stages with themes and designs such as "the salad lover's garden," "the heirloom maze garden," "the children's garden," and "the organic rotation garden." More than 100 recipes featuring the food grown in each specific garden encompass a full range of soups, salads, main course savory dishes, and desserts, as well as condiments and garnish to dress up the plate.
Week-By-Week Vegetable Gardener's Handbook
Timing is everything, they say, and vegetable gardening is no exception. Knowing exactly when to start seeds indoors,what day to transplant them into the ground, when to pinch off the blossoms, and when to pick for peak flavor is the secret to enjoying bountiful harvests all through the gardening season.
 
In Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener's Handbook, authors Ron and Jennifer Kujawski take the guesswork out of gardening with weekly to-do lists that break gardening down into easily manageable tasks. Suitable for all gardening zones, the book offers easy instructions for setting up a personalized schedule based on your last frost date.

The Kujawskis are an inspiring father- daughter team who share their own triumphs, mistakes, and misadventures over many years spent together in the vegetable patch. Readers will enjoy the friendly direction and advice these veterans offer. Easy-to-read boxes, bulleted lists, charts, and detailed how-to illustrations make each week's activities clear and doable. Spots for record-keeping encourage readers to track their own successes and fine-tune their weekly schedules from year to year.


Inch by inch, row by row, week by week, gardeners will move confidently through the gardening season. Whether it's planting the strawberries, pinching off the pumpkin blossoms, checking for tomato hornworm, or harvesting the carrots, they will know exactly when and how to do it for the most bountiful harvests and the most enjoyable vegetable-growing experiences ever.

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