9 Books for Backyard Gardeners
Are you looking for the perfect book to give the gardener in your life? (Or yourself?) If so, you’re in the right place! Our backyard gardening roundup is your one-stop-(book)shop for all gardeners; indoor gardeners, backyard gardeners, raised-bed gardeners, new and old gardeners– ALL GARDENERS! If you can’t find what you’re looking for below, head on over to our Gardening page for even more great gardening reads.
Year-Round Indoor Salad Gardening offers good news: with nothing more than a cupboard and a windowsill, you can grow all the fresh salad greens you need for the winter months (or throughout the entire year) with no lights, no pumps, and no greenhouse.
This book is a revolutionary and inviting guide for both first-time and experienced gardeners in rural or urban environments. All you need is a windowsill or two. In fact, Burke has grown up to six pounds of greens per day using just the windowsills in his kitchen! Year-Round Indoor Salad Gardening offers detailed step-by-step instructions to mastering this method (hint: it’s impossible not to succeed, it’s so easy!), tools and accessories to have on hand, seeds and greens varieties, soil and compost, trays and planters, shelving, harvest and storage, recipes, scaling up to serve local markets, and much more.
Featured Excerpts
Must Have Tools for Successful Indoor Gardening
No Garden? No Problem! Grow Your Own Salad Indoors
No-till farming has rapidly grown in popularity among vegetable growers due to its high-quality, high-yield, high-profit results. Renowned organic grower Bryan O’Hara perfected the technique during the multi-year transition of his Connecticut vegetable farm to a no-till system. His vibrantly healthy, resilient plants are testaments to the value of allowing the inherent biological functions in soil to do their work.
In No-Till Intensive Vegetable Culture, O’Hara describes the methods he has developed, which are completely free of herbicides or other pesticides and require only a few acres of land and minimal capital investment. He asserts that this flexible, ecological methodology is as important for soil fertility as it is for his economic success.
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A Nourishing Recipe to Boost Seedling Growth
Weeding: Work Smarter, Not Harder
Many people mistakenly think that ecological gardening—which involves growing a wide range of edible and other useful plants—can take place only on a large, multiacre scale. As Hemenway demonstrates, it’s fun and easy to create a “backyard ecosystem” by assembling communities of plants that can work cooperatively and perform a variety of functions.
Whatever size yard or garden you have to work with, you can apply basic permaculture principles to make it more diverse, more natural, more productive, and more beautiful. Best of all, once it’s established, an ecological garden will reduce or eliminate most of the backbreaking work that’s needed to maintain the typical lawn and garden.
Featured Excerpts
Designing a Forest Garden: The Seven-Layer Garden
In The Regenerative Grower’s Guide to Garden Amendments, experimental gardener and author Nigel Palmer provides practical, detailed instructions that are accessible to every grower who wants to achieve a truly sustainable garden ecosystem—all while enjoying better results at a fraction of the cost of commercial fertilizer products.
The Regenerative Grower’s Guide to Garden Amendments also includes a primer on plant-soil interaction, instructions for conducting a soil test, and guidance on compost, cover cropping, mulching, measuring the quality of fruits and vegetables using a refractometer, and other aspects of sustainable gardening—making it a must-have resource for any serious grower.
Featured Excerpts
From the Ground Up: Using Soil Amendments
A Drink Only a Garden Could Love: Fermented Plant Juice
Transform your garden into a self-sustaining haven for nature and wildlife. Ecological garden designer Matt Rees-Warren shares inspirational design ideas and practical projects to help you create a garden that is both beautiful today and sustainable tomorrow.
The Ecological Gardener will give you the tools to create an abundant, healthy garden from the soil up—a garden that welcomes birds and bees and allows native planting and wild flowers to flourish, with minimal carbon impact or need for fresh water.
Matt will show you how to re-imagine how you garden, working with nature instead of controlling it, to create a space that promotes both wildlife and beauty.
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Say Goodbye to Mowing: Turn Your Lawn Into a Meadow
15 Questions to Ask When Designing Your Garden
Scientist/gardener Carol Deppe combines her passion for organic gardening with newly emerging scientific information from many fields — resilience science, climatology, climate change, ecology, anthropology, paleontology, sustainable agriculture, nutrition, health, and medicine.
The Resilient Gardener is both a conceptual and a hands-on organic gardening book, and is suitable for vegetable gardeners at all levels of experience. It is a supremely optimistic as well as realistic book about how resilient gardeners and their vegetable gardens can flourish even in challenging times and help their communities to survive and thrive through everything that comes their way — from tomorrow through the next thousand years.
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Food in Uncertain Times: How to Grow and Store the 5 Crops You Need to Survive
Throughout, the book emphasizes practical information on all the best tools and practices for growers who want to build their livelihood around maximizing the health of their soil.
Farmer Jesse reminds growers that “as possible” is the mantra for protecting the living soil: disturb the soil as little as you possibly can in your context. He does not believe that growers should anguish over what does and does not qualify as “no-till.” If you are using a tool to promote soil life and biology, that’s the goal. Jesse’s goal with The Living Soil Handbook is to provide a comprehensive set of options, materials, and field-tested practices to inspire growers to design a soil-nurturing no-till system in their unique garden or farm ecosystem.
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Designing an Efficient Garden: Permanent Beds
Caring For Your Plants: The Five Keys to Photosynthesis
In Will Bonsall’s Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening, Bonsall maintains that to achieve real wealth we first need to understand the economy of the land, to realize that things that might make sense economically don’t always make sense ecologically, and vice versa. The marketplace distorts our values, and our modern dependence on petroleum in particular presents a serious barrier to creating a truly sustainable agriculture.
In a friendly, almost conversational way, Bonsall imparts a wealth of knowledge drawn from his more than forty years of farming experience.
“My goal,” he writes, “is not to feed the world, but to feed myself and let others feed themselves. If we all did that, it might be a good beginning.”
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How to Make Your Own Mulch with Fallen Leaves
Since its original publication in 1989, The New Organic Grower has been one of the most important farming books available, with pioneer Eliot Coleman leading the charge in the organic movement in the United States.
Inspired by the European intensive growers, The New Organic Grower, 30th Anniversary Edition, offers a very approachable and productive form of farming that has proven to work well for the earth and its stewards for centuries. Gardeners working on 2.5 acres or less will find this book especially useful, as it offers proof that small-scale market growers and serious home gardeners can live good lives close to the land and make a profit at the same time. The New Organic Grower is ideal for young farmers just getting started, or gardeners seeking to expand into a more productive enterprise.
Featured Excerpts
How to Extend the Growing Season