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

Although the garden may beckon as strongly as ever, the tasks involved—pulling weeds, pushing wheelbarrows, digging holes, moving heavy pots—become increasingly difficult, or even impossible, with advancing age. But the idea of giving it up is unthinkable for most gardeners. So what’s the alternative? In Gardening for a Lifetime, now in paperback, Sydney Eddison draws on her own forty years of gardening to provide a practical and encouraging roadmap for scaling back while keeping up with the gardening activities that each gardener loves most. Like replacing demanding plants like delphiniums with sturdy, relatively carefree perennials like sedums, rudbeckias, and daylilies. Or taking the leap and hiring help—another pair of hands, even for a few hours a week, goes a long way toward getting a big job done. Or maybe it makes sense to get rid of high-maintenance trees, shrubs, or perennials. The paperback edition features a new chapter in which Sydney’s struggles with hip and back problems force her to walk the walk. As a friend of hers says, "Last summer you wrote the book. Now, I'm happy to see that you've read it." Gentle, personable, and practical, Gardening for a Lifetime will be welcomed by all gardeners looking to transform gardening from a list of daunting chores into the rewarding, joy-filled activity it was meant to be.

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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

This revised edition of an old favorite, first published in 1978, explains how to cultivate and preserve all types of fruit, herbs, and vegetables, in addition to instructions on keeping bees and raising chickens. AUTHOR BIO: John Seymour authored over 40 books, including the DK's best-selling Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency and The Forgotten Arts & Crafts. He died in the fall of 2004 at the age of 90.

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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

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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

With few exceptions-such as corn and pumpkins-everything edible that's grown in a traditional garden can be raised in a container. And with only one exception-watering-container gardening is a whole lot easier. Beginning with the down-to-earth basics of soil, sun and water, fertilizer, seeds and propagation, The Bountiful Container is an extraordinarily complete, plant-by-plant guide.Written by two seasoned container gardeners and writers, The Bountiful Container covers Vegetables-not just tomatoes (17 varieties) and peppers (19 varieties), butharicots verts, fava beans, Thumbelina carrots, Chioggia beets, and sugarsnap peas. Herbs, from basil to thyme, and including bay leaves, fennel, and saffron crocus. Edible Flowers, such as begonias, calendula, pansies, violets, and roses. And perhaps most surprising, Fruits, including apples, peaches, Meyer lemons, blueberries, currants, and figs-yes, even in the colder parts of the country. (Another benefit of container gardening: You can bring the less hardy perennials in over the winter.) There are theme gardens (an Italian cook's garden, a Four Seasons garden), lists of sources, and dozens of sidebars on everything from how to be a human honeybee to seeds that are All America Selections.

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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

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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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