9 Books for Backyard Gardeners
Searching for the perfect book to give the gardener in your life? These books are great gifts for gardeners at any level.
Head over to our Gardening page for even more great gardening reads!
In The Home-Scale Forest Garden, Dani Baker shares what she learned as she became a forest gardener, providing a practical, in-depth guide to creating a beautiful, bountiful edible landscape at any scale—from a few dozen square feet to an acre or more.
This is the perfect guide for gardeners of all experience levels who want to work with nature’s model and expand the range of food crops they grow as they embark on their own forest garden adventure.
Featured Excerpts
The Seven Layers of A Forest Garden
Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts is a one-stop compendium of the most productive, edible fruit-and nut-bearing crops that push the boundaries of what can survive winters in cold-temperate growing regions. With beautiful and instructive color photographs throughout, the book is also full of concise, clearly written botanical and cultural information based on the authors’ years of growing experience.
Both experienced and novice gardeners who are interested in creating a sustainable landscape with a greater diversity of plant life—while also providing healthy foods—will find this book an invaluable resource.
Featured Excerpts
7 Factors to Consider When Choosing a Planting Site
Growing Cold-Hardy Black Raspberries
How to Protect Plants from Winter Elements
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. 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!).
Featured Excerpts
Must Have Tools for Successful Indoor Gardening
No Garden? No Problem! Grow Your Own Salad Indoors
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 Toby 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
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.
Featured Excerpts
Food in Uncertain Times: How to Grow and Store the 5 Crops You Need to Survive
“So much thoughtful insight and practical advice is contained in these pages…Jane uses nature as a guide to living life in harmony rather than discord.”—Rosemary Gladstar, author of Rosemary Gladstar’s Medicinal Herbs
Gardeners of every level of experience will find new insights, ideas, and inspiration in this unusual, beautiful, and highly practical guide to the simple yet expansive art of consulting with the cosmos to inform our garden tasks on any given day, week, or month and enjoy greater gardening satisfaction and success.
Featured Excerpts
Keeping Seeds Organized: Saving & Storing
“If you wish to live well and eat well no matter what is going on in the rest of the world, this book is for you…Will Bonsall will help you enjoy the good life under any and all conditions.”—Eliot Coleman, author of The New Organic Grower
In a friendly, almost conversational way, Will 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.”
Featured Excerpts
How to Make Your Own Mulch with Fallen Leaves
Whether you’re an experienced gardener, homesteader, or market farmer, this A–Z, soil-to-table guide shows you how to reduce chemical inputs; naturally enrich your growing ecology; and create a hardy, nutrient-dense, and delicious crop.
In The Healthy Vegetable Garden, expert organic gardener Sally Morgan explains how to use natural approaches to cope with the challenges of a changing climate through principles from regenerative gardening, agroecology, and permaculture—all to help your green space thrive.
Featured Excerpts
Why Mulch Matters: Mulching 101
10 Easy-to-Grow Flowers for Pest Control
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