Since 1973, Storey's Country Wisdom Bulletins have offered practical, hands-on instructions designed to help readers master dozens of country living skills quickly and easily. There are now more than 170 titles in this series, and their remarkable popularity reflects the common desire of country and city dwellers alike to cultivate personal independence in everyday life.
Grocery Row Gardening An Exciting New Permaculture Gardening System Imagine creating a garden where apples and asparagus thrive beside beans and broccoli. Picture beautiful rows of trees, vegetables and flowers all growing together as butterflies, birds and bees dance overhead. Walk through with a basket and pick pears and blueberries, peppers and tomatoes, herbs and cut flowers - all from the same garden. With Grocery Row Gardening, you'll learn to harness the power of a forest's edge by linking the abundance of a food forest with a traditional vegetable garden. Grocery Row Gardening is a new permaculture gardening method that combines multiple different gardening systems into a resilient, pest-resistant, long-term food generating machine for your backyard. It combines ideas as diverse as Steve Solomon's writings on micronutrients with Geoff Lawton's food forest design, with Stefan Sobkowiak's permaculture orchard and Ernst Götsch's Syntropic Farming, with Ann Ralph's backyard orchard culture and edible hedges. It makes for a beautiful and powerful permaculture method that sails through weather extremes and creates a survival garden which will keep your family fed with a wide range of produce, month after month. Though this system is still in development, this book outlines how you can join in the fun and experimentation as Grocery Row Gardening takes off. Learn to think about growing food in a whole new way and create your most diverse and beautiful garden yet.
Since 1973, Storey's Country Wisdom Bulletins have offered practical, hands-on instructions designed to help readers master dozens of country living skills quickly and easily. There are now more than 170 titles in this series, and their remarkable popularity reflects the common desire of country and city dwellers alike to cultivate personal independence in everyday life.
Easier and Cheaper to Set Up Than Raised Beds! For homeowners young and old looking for the easiest and most affordable way to grow the most vegetables, the Raised Row method shared in this breakthrough book is the new go-to choice. In the past decade, raised bed gardening has been wildly popular, but it requires buying wood or another material to build the raised beds, which quickly becomes expensive and labor intense. A raised row garden uses just soil and mulch, such as shredded leaves, to create raised growing rows and walking rows. This method is more budget-friendly, natural and just as effective to control weeds and see an impressive harvest your first year. Jim and Mary Competti, founders of the blog Old World Garden Farms, are the leaders of this gardening revolution. They’ve perfected and streamlined their method over several years. They spend only a few minutes per day maintaining a large garden that provides their family with food for the whole year. In this book, they share their secrets so anyone can do it too. Raised rows utilize straw mulch, compost and cover crops to enrich the soil you have and keep down weeds naturally. This way, no backbreaking overturning of the beds is required, as it is for traditional row gardening. Now, readers can work less and enjoy the fruits of their gardens more!
Principles and farm-tested practices for no-till market gardening--for healthier, more productive soil! From the host of the popular The No-Till Market Garden Podcast—heard around the world with nearly one million downloads! Discovering how to meet the soil’s needs is the key task for every market gardener. In this comprehensive guide, Farmer Jesse Frost shares all he has learned through experience and experimentation with no-till practices on his home farm in Kentucky and from interviews and visits with highly successful market gardeners in his role as host of The No-Till Market Garden Podcast. The Living Soil Handbook is centered around the three basic principles of no-till market gardening: Disturb the soil as little as possible Keep it covered as much as possible Keep it planted as much as possible. Farmer Jesse then guides readers in applying those principles to their own garden environment, with their own materials, to meet their own goals. Beginning with an exploration of the importance of photosynthesis to living soil, Jesse provides in-depth information on: Turning over beds Using compost and mulch Path management Incorporating biology, maintaining fertility Cover cropping Diversifying plantings through intercropping Production methods for seven major crops 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. "[A] practical, informative debut. . . .Gardeners interested in sustainable agriculture will find this a great place to start."—Publishers Weekly "Frost offers a comprehensive, science-based, sympathetic, wholly practical guide to soil building, that most critical factor in vegetable gardening for market growers and home gardeners alike. A gift to any vegetable plot that will keep on giving."—Booklist (starred review)
A new edition of the classic gardening handbook details a simple yet highly effective gardening system, based on a grid of one-foot by one-foot squares, that produces big yields with less space and with less work than with conventional row gardens. Reissue. 30,000 first printing.
A stunning guide to growing, harvesting, and arranging gorgeous dahlia blooms from celebrated farmer-florist and New York Times bestselling author Erin Benzakein, founder of Floret Flower Farm. World-renowned flower farmer and floral designer Erin Benzakein reveals all the secrets to growing, cultivating, and arranging gorgeous dahlias. These coveted floral treasures come in a dazzling range of colors, sizes, and forms, with enough variety for virtually every garden space and personal preference, making them one of the most beloved flowers for arrangements. In these pages, readers will discover: • Expert advice for planting, harvesting, and arranging garden-fresh dahlias • A simple-to-follow overview of the dahlia classification system • An A–Z guide with photos and descriptions of more than 350 varieties • Step-by-step how-to's for designing show-stopping dahlia bouquets that elevate any occasion Expert Author: Erin Benzakein's gorgeous flowers are celebrated throughout the world. Her book Floret Farm's A Year in Flowers was a New York Times bestseller and her first book, Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden, won the American Horticultural Society Book Award. Filled with Wisdom: Overflowing with hundreds of lush photographs and invaluable advice, DISCOVERING DAHLIAS is an essential resource for gardeners and a must-have for anyone who loves flowers, including flower lovers, avid and novice gardeners, floral designers, florists, small farmers, stylists, and designers.
