Make a Garden

Home Outside: Creating the Landscape You Love

admin — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 23:36:10 +0000

An Outside-the-Box Guide to Outdoor Living. Let's face it: most of us have the confidence to improve the inside of our homes with a fresh coat of paint, new rugs, furniture, and fixtures. But when it comes to the outside of our most prized possession, we don't know where to start. That's where Julie Moir Messervy's Home Outside comes in. The acclaimed landscape designer walks the reader through the process of turning any property into the home outside you've always dreamed of. Focusing on key concepts like Finding Your Comfort Zone and Placing the Pieces, Messervy presents breathtaking plans for remarkable front and back lawns, entertainment areas, and contemplative retreats, as well as innovative ways to create a better flow between the inside and outside of a house.

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Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World

admin — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:21:04 +0000

Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate is fundamental work that permeates your entire life. It demands your energy and heart, and it gives you back great treasures as well, like a fortified sense of humor, an appreciation for paradox, and a huge harvest of Dinosaur kale and tiny red potatoes.For more than thirty years, Wendy Johnson has been meditating and gardening at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in northern California, where the fields curve like an enormous green dragon between the hills and the ocean. Renowned for its pioneering role in California’s food revolution, Green Gulch provides choice produce to farmers’ markets and to San Francisco’s Greens restaurant. Now Johnson has distilled her lifetime of experience into this extraordinary celebration of inner and outer growth, showing how the garden cultivates the gardener even as she digs beds, heaps up compost, plants flowers and fruit trees, and harvests bushels of organic vegetables. Johnson is a hands-on, on-her-knees gardener, and she shares with the reader a wealth of practical knowledge and fascinating garden lore. But she is also a lover of the untamed and weedy, and she evokes through her exquisite prose an abiding appreciation for the earth—both cultivated and forever wild—in a book sure to earn a place in the great tradition of American nature writing.

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Gardening for a Lifetime: How to Garden Wiser as You Grow Older

admin — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 23:44:08 +0000

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Starter Vegetable Gardens: 24 No-Fail Plans for Small Organic Gardens

admin — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 07:03:05 +0000

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

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The New Self-Sufficient Gardener

admin — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 04:56:17 +0000

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The American Gardener Complete Guide – Gardening Tips and Techniques That Really Work! (Kindle Edition)

admin — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:44:42 +0000

If you think people are born with a green thumb, THINK AGAIN!The American Gardener provides over pages and pages of helpful gardening how to information, and tips that will help you grow plants with ease without them dying like they did on me!Even if you're a professional gardener, you'll find many tips to help better your growing success!Here's What You'll Find In The American Gardener:Choosing the right location on your property for growing plants. You'll find in depth information on slope of your land, and what spot is best for growing successfully.Preparing the soil properly to provide nutrition for healthy plants.Fencing techniques for your garden. I LOVE this section. The author provides humorous techniques for using hawthorn trees as fencing, to keep troublesome lads from stealing their fruits and vegetables! You do not need to spend hundreds for a chain link, wooden or brick fence. Use hawthorn trees and with a little love and time you'll have a fence that will make your neighbors green with envy!Designing, or laying out, your garden so that it's pleasing to the eye yet functional as well.You'll learn how to make hotbeds, so that you can start your vegetables earlier in the season and have edible produce as many as 15 days earlier than normal! This can be a moneymaker if you sell produce. Be the first in your neighborhood to have fresh green tomatoes and watermelons!Learn the benefits of operating a hobby greenhouse, and how it can be beneficially to your household.Learn about true seeds and the soundness of seed. You'll learn how to test seed before you plant them, to determine if you have good seed or bad. Some seed will not grow if it's bad, and by using a simple technique you can throw out the bad instead of laboring with planting them only to find no lovely sprouts growing where they were sowed.Learn proper methods for saving and preserving seed. I find this the most fun of gardening! I now save seed regularly and have a yard full of beautiful blooms from seeds I have saved and sown.Learn proper sowing methods to improve your seeds germination rate, and to ensure healthy plants. Proper spacing and depth can mean success or failure in the garden!American Gardener provides proper transplanting methods, to ensure your plants survival when moving from one area to another. This is the chapter that covers the information I was looking for, to ensure my Japanese Maples survival. I now have two Japanese Maples growing successfully in my yard, and what beauty they both bring!Cultivating your garden properly and methods for tilling, trenching and sowing to ensure your gardens success.Learn propagating methods so that you can grow many more plants form just one stock plant. Learn propagating from cuttings, by grafting, by using stock tress, by budding and by layering. All of these are easy and fun methods that you and your family are sure to enjoy!There is a nice section on growing grapes in minimum space while producing so many grapes that it'll make your mouth water!Learn how to successfully grow 81 different vegetables and herbs, 26 tasty fruits and nuts and the most popular flowers and shrubs with the most gorgeous blooms!You are sure to love the information, guidance and tips provided in American Gardener!

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McGee & Stuckey’s Bountiful Container: Create Container Gardens of Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits, and Edible Flowers

admin — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:35:25 +0000

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New Illustrated Guide to Gardening

admin — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 09:56:11 +0000

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Grocery Gardening

admin — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 21:46:57 +0000

Grocery Gardening includes garden planning, planting, preparing, preserving and nutritional information for each of the more than twenty selected edibles. In addition to tips on when to harvest home grown vegetables, the authors offer advice on how to select the freshest produce at the local market, and select complementary ingredients to combine with your home-grown edibles. Jean Ann Van Krevelen, together with her team of food and gardening experts and their community of readers, encourage gardeners and non-gardeners alike to plan meals based on what is in season. Whether you buy local or grow your own, the recipes will delight your family with seasonal freshness. Also included is a chapter on preserving your harvest, with tips for freezing, drying, canning and preserving.

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The New York Times 1000 Gardening Questions and Answers: Based on the New York Times Column “Garden Q & A.”

admin — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 21:23:07 +0000

Authoritative, accessible, and engaging, here is a new reference from The New York Times, a comprehensive, nearly 700-page bible of all the garden news that's fit to print. Based on "Gardeners Q&A." the enormously popular syndicated column, 1000 GARDENING QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS is like a passionate conversation between gardeners and gardening experts. Every week readers from around the country send in their most vexing problems-how to divide perennials, prune raspberry canes, grow basil that really tastes like basil, get rid of earwigs, find long-lost varieties of flowers, keep honeysuckle under control-and every week, the authorities at the Times write a column full of answers. Carefully selected, updated, and expanded by Leslie Land, one of the column's two authors, here are 1,000 Q&As that add up to an informal encyclopedia of gardening knowledge. The book covers flowers, trees, shrubs, the lawn, vegetables, herbs, fruit, indoor plants, soil, pests, and troublemakers. It addresses problems and provides answers to difficulties in every North American zone. Hundreds of line drawings illustrate the book, providing botanical identification and demonstrating how-to gardening techniques. In addition, sidebars throughout supply supplemental information-"Dos and Don'ts of Deadheading," "Annuals that Beat the Heat," "To Prune or Not to Prune: The Clematis Question," "Air Layering," "Windowsill Bonsai"-plus quirky facts, trivia, lore, and myth. It's big, it's got heft, it's filled to the brim with information. And it's so lively, it reads like a novel-and belongs on every gardener's potting bench and bedside table.

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