Gardening/Horticulture

Home vegetable gardening is all the rage. Millions of Americans have picked up spade and hoe and are digging into the soil for the first time. But starting a garden isn’t always simple. Many hopeful growers find themselves confused by the dizzying array of things to know about soil quality, garden layout, seeds, temperatures, planting schedules, fertilizer, pests, watering, and harvesting. Still other first-time gardeners plant too much, only to find themselves overwhelmed and exhausted by July.

Barbara Pleasant is here to help. In Starter Vegetable Gardens, Pleasant a master gardener and award-winning gardening writer takes the guesswork out of growing food, explaining in simple, straightforward language how to start, maintain, and expand a bountiful vegetable garden in small, manageable spaces.

Pleasant presents 24 no-fail, small-scale garden plans from a simple bag garden (planted right in soil bags!) to an orderly border and from a family food factory to specialty beds for salads, Cajun flavors, and Italian cuisine. For each plan she provides plant and material lists, a plot layout, four-color photographs, and tips for succession planting to keep the garden productive all season long. Her all-organic approach ensures that the harvest is not simply tasty but also chemical-free.

Pleasant anticipates and answers novice gardeners myriad questions, guiding readers through the complexities of assessing site and soil, understanding the climate, choosing the very best vegetable varieties, starting seeds, identifying insect friends and foes, watering, fertilizing, mulching, and harvesting.

The books layout is friendly and accessible, filled with detailed images that bring the concepts to life. Both instructive and inspiring, Starter Vegetable Gardens is an essential one-stop resource for anyone just beginning to cultivate a vegetable-gardening green thumb.

Includes 24 illustrated planting plans including:

•  Easy-Care Bag Garden
•  Backyard Veggie Border
•  Front-Yard Food Supply
•  Family Food Factory
•  Paintbrush Beds
•  High-Value Verticals
•  Marinara Medley
•  Managed Mulch Garden
•  Sweet Corn & Company
•  Cajun Spice
•  Six-Weeks-Sooner Salad Garden

The gardener's fantasy of colorful blooms that begin in early spring and continue through the last glow of fall is now an achievable reality. With a little careful planning and the fun-to-use formulas in The Ever-Blooming Flower Garden, season-spanning  spectacular color is more attainable than ever before.

Author Lee Schneller developed her blueprint system when she began designing gardens professionally, and she has successfully applied it to more than 150 gardens. Now she brings her proven system to gardeners everywhere who continue to chase that elusive dream of perpetual bloom. 

Schneller's system is a wonder of organization and information - packed with checklists and questionnaires, planning equations and plant characteristics. Yet for all its wealth of information, gardeners of every level will find Schneller's techniques simple to use and her blueprints fun to customize. Readers choose from a list of 220 low-maintenance plants organized by bloom month and supported by a Flower Catalog with basic growing information and photos of all 220 plants.

By following five simple steps, readers develop a unique garden design featuring personally chosen plants that deliver height, color, and tons of blooms all season long. For added convenience, the completed planning chart also serves as a plant shopping list.

Once the blueprint has been created,  Schneller helps readers put the plan to work, offering advice on shopping, planting, and finally, enjoying and maintaining the garden.

Praise for the book:
"The book lives up to its title: It is a blueprint for continuous color in the garden (at least from early spring to fall). There is instruction on mapping it all out on a grid -- and also instructions for those who don't want to put pen to paper. Don't be daunted; I'm not a mathematical person, but it makes sense to me. Lee Schneller, who has designed and built more than 150 gardens in Maine since 1995, takes you through the five steps to continuous color, including grabbing graph paper and a pen and checking out the plant palette and flower catalog in the back of the book. I particularly liked the flower catalog, which lists more than 200 trusty perennials selected for, among other things, their hardiness, attractive flowers and foliage, and long bloom time. The flower catalog provides the bloom period of each in a useful, graphical way. My only wish is that Schneller would publish a follow-up flower catalog for those who want more."  -Ann Robinson, www.oregonlive.com 05/06/09

"If you, like me, love color in the garden, both for admiring and cutting, you'll pick up The Ever-Blooming Flower Garden. The book lives up to its title: it IS a blue print for continuous color in the garden." - New York Newsday

"The book is divided into five parts, which follow a logical path to allow any homeowner with some basic growing skills to create an attractive continuously blooming flower garden."
-- Portland Press Herald, 7/14/08

This classic has now taught generations of gardeners how to use the natural benefits of plants to protect and support each other. Here is a reader's complete reference to which plants nourish the soil, which keep away bugs and pests, and which plants just don't get along. Here is a complete guide to using companion planting to grow a better garden. 555,000 copies in print.