Linda Tilger encourages you to embrace the lazy gardener within to work smarter and relax harder. With hundreds of time-saving techniques, Tips for the Lazy Gardener shows you how easy it can be to grow hearty vegetables and fragrant herbs. Covering everything from planning an efficient garden to effective shortcuts for harvesting your crops, Tilga’s expert suggestions are designed to mitigate chore time while increasing your gardening pleasure. Enjoy a thriving and abundant garden — without all the back-breaking, energy-sapping work.
This charmingly-designed book reminds the reader of the lovely retreat a garden can be--and how attainable it truly is! Includes tips on choosing low-maintenance plants, suggestions for choosing easy-care non-plant items as focal points, keeping a budget, and easy-to-read charts and lists. Black and white illustrations throughout.
Creating the perfect garden should be simple and fun and, with a little know how, it can be. In The Lazy Gardener, Don Burke has created a fuss-free guide to low-maintenance gardening. With a sense of humour Australians have come to know and love, Don inspires us to create fabulous havens for kicking back and relaxing, tells us how to grow fruit and vegetables the easy way and reveals how to design magical play areas for children. He introduces us to the wonders of manure,solutions to weed control and provides a comprehensive guide on when to plant just about everything.Don Burke is one of Australia s foremost experts on gardening. Through long-running lifestyle television programs Burke s Backyard and Backyard Blitz, as well as Burke s Backyard magazine, Don Burke is a household name. With his help, families across the country have been transforming their backyards into fabulousoutdoor living spaces for more than 25 years.
Explains how to use a system of layered mulch materials, including newspaper, leaves, and grass clippings, to provide a nutrient-rich base for healthy gardens and robust flowers, herbs, vegetables, and fruits
In this lively and inspiring book, veteran horticulturalist Robert Kourik (aka "Bob") unfolds his manifesto of "Inspired Laziness"--using efficiency and forethought to create gardens and landscapes with a lot less work and a lot more enjoyment. By following Kourik's relaxed and readable guidance, both beginning and accomplished gardeners will discover how to save time and money, enrich their soil, increase their yields, and reduce their effort, all while absorbing "Bob's" philosophy of kicking back and growing more good times. Drawing on over four decades of immersing himself in horticultural work (and writing about it), Robert shares his hard-won secrets for the easiest planning, planting, cultivating, landscaping, irrigating, de-pestifying, and finding enjoyment in settings ranging from window-box herbs to showy ornamental plantings to the now-classic "edible landscape." In Lazy-Ass Gardening, you'll learn how to: Ease into gardening, if you're a newbie. Figure out which edibles to raise, with a careful selection of the most care-free varieties and tips for easy growing. Lay out your garden to balance effective growing area with space for enjoyment, relaxation, and play. Cultivate creatively to grow your own nutrients and build healthy self-sustaining (no-till) soil for the future. Attract the best pollinating insects and deter hungry pests. Plan your "hardscape" (paths, patios, arbors, etc.), for an easy-care (and more fun) aspect of your yard or garden. Choose the right plants for your landscape, climate, soil, and water supply, not to mention your aesthetic and nutritional needs. Learn how to develop a personal garden that manifests your own eccentricities. Grow more, stress less.
This is not your grandmother's gardening book. You Grow Girl is a hip, humorous how-to for crafty gals everywhere who are discovering a passion for gardening but lack the know-how to turn their dreams of homegrown tomatoes and fresh-cut flowers into a reality. Gayla Trail, creator of YouGrowGirl.com, provides guidance for both beginning and intermediate gardeners with engaging tips, projects, and recipes -- whether you have access to a small backyard or merely to a fire escape. You Grow Girl eliminates the intimidation factor and reveals how easy and enjoyable it can be to cultivate plants and flowers even when resources and space are limited. Divided into accessible sections like Plan, Plant, and Grow, You Grow Girl takes readers through the entire gardening experience: Preparing soil Nurturing seedlings Fending off critters Reaping the bounty Readying plants for winter Preparing for the seasons ahead Gayla also includes a wealth of ingenious and creative projects, such as: Transforming your garden's harvest into lush bath and beauty products Converting household junk into canny containers Growing and bagging herbal tea Concocting homemade pest repellents ...and much, much more. Witty, wise, and as practical as it is stylish, You Grow Girl is guaranteed to show you how to get your garden on. All you need is a windowsill and a dream!
Sit back, relax and let your garden offset some of your carbon footprint. Finally, here is the information we all need to make a real and positive contribution towards climate change, while doing what we love most - gardening! Earth Repair Gardening guides the reader through the garden, discussing options for reducing our environmental impact at every turn. We are encouraged to make those changes that suit us best when it comes to gardening more sustainably. This is not a one size fits all, it delves into the complexity of choices available to us, guiding us to the best outcome for our own situation. By doing less work, we can grow more as our gardens become working carbon sinks. This book teaches us about knowing, respecting and caring for the earth we live and garden on. This book will make you a better gardener, it will make your garden more fabulous, and it will help you make this world a better place.
Do you enjoy natural beauty but dont have the time to cultivate a garden Have you always longed for a beautiful yard, but find the idea of self-imposed yard work downright unpleasant For busy people who want to have a garden but dont have the timeor dont want to spend the time The Lazy Gardener tells us how to decrease the effort and increase the enjoyment of having a garden, in an amusing but practical way. Readers can get right to the heart of their problems by starting with a fun, hands-on quiz called HELP I'm Too Busy to Read This Book, or spend a leisurely afternoon reading the book from cover to cover. The author covers everything from choosing the right plants for your environment to designing a manageable garden and paring down chores. The book is illustrated with beautiful drawings by Vasily Kafanov. Mara Grey has been a professional gardener for over 20 years. Her weekly radio show, The Lazy Gardener, is broadcast in Washington, and she has a newspaper column by the same name. Grey writes for such publications as Horticulture Magazine, and teaches classes on gardening and landscape designthis year she will be teaching a Lazy Gardener course.
A masterpiece, full of charm and humor." --Dr. Rebecca W. Dolan, Director, Friesner Herbarium, Butler University Whether it's urban, suburban, or rural, nearly every property has some shade, if only on the north side of the house. Countless more are "blessed" with giant trees planted decades ago that screen out the sunlight. Under such conditions, you may think that it's impossible to have an interesting garden without a lot of work. Not so if you are willing to learn about the plethora of easygoing horticultural gems that don't require full sun. Most gardeners think only of impatiens and hostas for their shady areas, but shade gardening can be far more interesting, and even exciting--and you need not work too hard at it if you incorporate some lesser-known but easy-to-grow plants into your landscape. Judiciously mixing the common plants with the more unusual ones can help the busy, tired, or lazy gardener create a special and unique retreat. Carolyn Harstad, author of the best-selling Go Native!, organizes this book around the principle that an interesting shade garden is well balanced and has a variety of plantings. Early chapters focus on designing the low-maintenance garden. Further chapters discuss small trees, shrubs, dwarf conifers, vines, ground covers, ferns, grasses, perennials, woodland wildflowers, spring bulbs, and annuals (yes, there are annuals that enjoy shade!). She discusses hundreds of shade-tolerant plants hardy in Zones 4-8, suggests how they may be used and combined, and recommends methods to reduce garden maintenance--a universal concern in this fast-paced world. With its informative text, accurate drawings, and colorful photographs, this book is a "must have" for gardeners across much of North America.
