Gardening Made Simple: The Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Gardening (Better Homes & Gardens Series)

Gardening Made Simple is a comprehensive step-by-step guide to creating beautiful gardens, including all the basics of planting, growing, and caring for trees, shrubs, flowers, fruits, vegetables, lawns and other greenery. With plenty of clear and explanatory full-color photographs, it gives beginners the inspiration and simple guidance they need to achieve their green-thumb dreams.

A helpful introductory section covers basic tools and techniques and shows you how to choose the right garden plans and plants for your Zone, prepare your soil, manage pests, and prune, mulch, fertilize, and water with ease.

No matter your gardening experience and skill level, Gardening Made Simple provides the inspiration, insight, and advice you need to grow the garden of your dreams.

Key Features

• Includes more than 65 step-by-step gardening projects.
• Features 145 easy-to-grow plants, including sections on container gardening, growing your own vegetables, fruits, and herbs, flower gardening, landscaping with trees, shrubs, vines, and groundcovers, and foolproof houseplants.
• Features more than 1,200 color photographs throughout, including step-by-step photos and shots of finished projects, as well as colorful illustrations and easy plant-by-number diagrams.
• Includes handy Ask the Garden Doctor question-and-answer content, and Better Homes and Gardens Test Garden tips throughout.

Contents

• Chapter 1. Getting Started
• Chapter 2. Understanding Plants
• Chapter 3. Choosing and Using Tools
• Chapter 4. Preparing and Improving Soil
• Chapter 5. Growing Turfgrass
• Chapter 6. Growing Flowers and Foliage
• Chapter 7. Growing Trees, Shrubs, and Vines
• Chapter 8. Growing Vines and Climbers
• Chapter 9. Growing Edibles
• Chapter 10. Making More Plants
• Chapter 11. Mulching and Fertilizing
• Chapter 12. Watering and Irrigating
• Chapter 13. Pruning
• Chapter 14. Gardening in Containers
• Chapter 15. Managing Weeds, Pests, and Diseases
• Resources
• Index

Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (November 15, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470638540
• ISBN-13: 978-0470638545

List Price: $24.99 

 

Rose Gardening (Better Homes & Gardens Series)

Better Homes and Gardens presents Rose Gardening, a comprehensive guide to growing great roses recommended by the American Rose Society. Roses are hardy, beautiful plants that grow easily and survive cold weather, so they continually remain popular for home gardeners. This practical guide combines the artistry of rose gardening with the green-thumb wisdom it takes to succeed.

For gardeners of every skill level-whether they've grown roses before or hardly know what one should look like-this book offers inspiration, beautiful photography, artistic and creative garden plans, and historical information that rose enthusiasts will love.

For anyone who loves roses and rose gardens, Rose Gardening is the ultimate resource for the home gardener.

Key Features

• Includes colorful diagrams, helpful checklists that make planning a breeze, easy-to-understand planting and caring directions, and much more.
• Features more than 600 stunning full-color photographs, including a gallery of roses that showcases hundreds of varieties.
• Offers advice on selecting the right roses for your geographical region, combining roses with other plants in your design, up-to-date information on pest control, and general garden maintenance.

Contents

History & Development.

• The first roses.
• Modern roses.
• Bigger & smaller blooms.
• Recent trends.

Selecting the right rose.

• Rose basics.
• Flowers & bushes.
• Rose families.
• Buying roses.
• Roses by region.

Landscaping & designing.

• Garden styles.
• Problem solvers.
• Pots & bouquets.
• Rose garden plans.

Rose care & maintenance.

• Preparing & Planting.
• Watering.
• Mulching, feeding & fertilizing.
• Dealing with pests.
• Pruning.
• Seasonal care.
• Hardiness & regional calendars.

Gallery of roses.

• Hybrid teas.
• Grandifloras.
• Floribundas.
• Polyanthas.
• Shrubs.
• Old Garden Roses & species.
• Miniatures & minifloras.
• Climbers & ramblers.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (December 7, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470878452
• ISBN-13: 978-0470878453
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.1 x 0.6 inches

List Price: $19.95 

 

How to Build, Maintain, and Use a Compost System: Secrets and Techniques You Need to Know to Grow the Best Vegetables (Back-To-Basics)

Some of the best fertilizer on the planet can be made with your very own garbage. Starting with something as simple as coffee grounds a top composting product and including all of your old banana peels, bread crusts, and leftover meals, you can start creating a garden with your food waste from scratch, using the age old secret of composting to build a healthy, happy garden. Knowing the necessary steps to building and cultivating a compost bin will help anyone with a garden no matter its size cut down on waste, save money on fertilizer, and have fun learning more about the cycle all biodegradable matter goes through.
This book provides a detailed outline of how anyone with a little extra space and a garden can start composting today to build their garden from scratch into a thriving jungle of roots, herbs, and vegetables. You will learn about all of the different ways that composting can be helpful to you, as well as the different reasons why people choose to compost and what you and your vegetables might best benefit from when you decide to make the leap and start composting yourself. You will learn how decomposition works and what the ideal conditions are for decomposition. You will learn which compostable materials are around you right now, from the coffee grounds in your coffee maker to the old fruit in your crisper. Learn about the different kinds of activators and how they get the process started as well as the different composting materials used by home gardeners and professional composters alike dozens of which have been interviewed for this book. You will be walked through the process of recognizing and using the end product as effectively as possible. You will be walked through how you can effectively take your end product and start using it for various different vegetable types in your garden. Finally, you will be walked through the process of recognizing and using the end product as effectively as possible.
For anyone who has ever considered composting as a viable means by which to feed their gardens, this book is for you.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Publishing Group Inc. (April 15, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1601383541
• ISBN-13: 978-1601383549

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

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.

Home Vegetable Gardening: A Complete and Practical Guide to the Planting and Care of all Vegetables, Fruits and Berries Worth Growing for Home Use (Illustrated Edition)

For those who understand the significance of home-grown foods to surviving and thriving in difficult times, F. F. Rockwell's no-nonsense Home Vegetable Gardening: A Complete And Practical Guide To The Planting And Care Of All Vegetables, Fruits And Berries Worth Growing For Home Use, may be the best single volume, practical manual of family-feeding, high-yield home gardening ever compiled. With some, the home vegetable garden is a hobby; with others, especially in these days of high prices, a great help. 

There are many in both classes whose experience in gardening has been restricted within very narrow bounds, and whose present spare time for gardening is limited. It is as "first aid" to such persons, who want to do practical, efficient gardening, and do it with the least possible fuss and loss of time, that this book is written. 

“Home Vegetable Gardening” can be very useful for the small space gardener as it discusses at length, basics of gardening. Anywhere the book describes use of horses, logic would indicate that a tiller of varying sizes could be substituted. Crop rotation is also discussed, and multiple acres are not needed for this. Instructions on constructing a manure-driven hotbed (the way things were done before electric seedling heat mats were around) are also included. 

 

Another section of “Home Gardening” discusses prepping sods for seed starting, the way things were done years before pellet pots, plastic seed flats and cell packs were common. “Home Gardening” is old enough to resurrect much of the forgotten techniques used by our grandparents and great-grandparents, when they had to garden more naturally and self-sufficiently rather than buying everything from the garden store. It might also be helpful for the budding survivalist who no longer wants to rely on manufactured products. The list of seed varieties is fascinating. When it comes to gardening basics, the publishing date of this book matters very little: many things haven’t changed at all. In fact, this book might be better for beginners since it is a book that encourages a do-it-yourself and a 'from the ground up' tone. It is almost void of any pre-made devices and there are no gimmicky products being hocked. 

In “Home Gardening,” the old standby tools are recommended, time tested and readily available. 

About the Author 

F. F. Rockwell authored the book "Home Vegetable Gardening" in the early 1900's, together with many articles on gardening and plants. 

Product Details

• Paperback: 202 pages
• Publisher: ReadaClassic.com (December 22, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1611043719
• ISBN-13: 978-1611043716
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.5 inches 

List Price: $14.95

Tomorrow's Garden: Design and Inspiration for a New Age of Sustainable Gardening

With a keen eye for aesthetics matched by a strong concern for the environment, garden expert Stephen Orr has developed a sense of what a modern garden should be: small, visually pleasing, and responsible. In Tomorrow’s Garden, he presents gardens in 14 American cities that have been scaled back and simplified without sacrificing beauty or innovative design.
A devoted supporter of the organic gardening movement, Orr advises gardeners to think about their gardens as part of an interconnected whole with the surrounding environment—with an eye to water usage, local ecology, and preservation of resources. However, for those who are afraid that a sustainable garden means a lack of flora and fauna, Orr believes that a garden, first and foremost, should be a thing of beauty. He encourages flower lovers to plant flowers, and he showcases gardens filled with traditional and exotic plants that are designed with both visual appeal and the environment in mind.
With detailed case studies, stunning photographs, and an appendix of resources and information to help gardeners achieve their ecological best, Tomorrow’s Garden will teach you the true definition of sustainability and show you how to create beauty without excess in the 21st century and beyond.

The Artful Garden: Creative Inspiration for Landscape Design

Guided by world-renowned landscape architect James van Sweden and horticulture expert Tom Christopher, any gardener can learn the secrets of the gardener’s art and absorb the essence of inspired garden design. In their gifted hands, creating your own perfect garden, with its own alluring mysteries, turns out to be not only easy but a delight.
Whether it’s a ten-foot-square city terrace or a ten-acre expanse, the same principles apply: the intelligent use of positive and negative space, of form and scale, of light and shadow, of rough and smooth textures. Do you want a garden you can immerse yourself in? A garden you can smell and listen to as well as observe? An exuberant garden or a contemplative garden?
In this elegantly written and visually stunning book, van Sweden reveals the secrets of famous gardens around the world and encourages you to find inspiration in the arts—in painting (from America’s classic regional artists to the abstract expressionists), music (from classical to jazz), sculpture, even dance. He introduces you to famous artists who share how their art has influenced the design of their own gardens, and teaches you to think not in terms of borders and beds or even paths and meadows but of a tapestry woven from sky, trees, rocks, vines, flowers, grasses, and space.
Richly illustrated throughout with magnificent photographs, The Artful Garden both tells and shows, sharing with beginning and experienced gardeners a wealth of inspiration and practical help. “What’s my message?” van Sweden asks in conclusion. The wise answer: “Don’t squander the potential for surprise and wonder.” This beautiful book guarantees everyone who reads it a priceless store of gardening wisdom.

A Clearing in the Woods: Creating Contemporary Gardens

In A Clearing in the Woods, landscape photographer Roger Foley brings luxuriant green spaces, quiet water features, and colorful plantings to life. Over the past thirty years, he has collaborated with many noted landscape designers and architects, many of whom have transformed the profession with radical experimentation and diverse ideas to create a contemporary approach to garden design.
A Clearing in the Woods presents twenty-six gardens across the United States: seaside and mountain, desert and countryside, urban and rural. Foley's exquisite photographs illuminate the work of such designers as Raymond Jungles, Edwina von Gal, Charles Stick, and Oehme, van Sweden & Associates. This remarkable blend of designers and projects—with styles ranging from classically composed geometric gardens to eclectic modern green spaces—represents the diversity of contemporary landscape design. Descriptions of each garden complement the visual presentation, highlighting sources of inspiration and design intent.

Private Gardens of Georgia

In Private Gardens of Georgia, you are invited for a tour of thirty of the most beautiful gardens across Georgia. From the mountains to the piedmont in south Georgia, to the coast and the Golden Isles, these unique gardens abound with radiant color and elegance. Also included are a brief history of each garden's evolution and, in many instances, comments by the owners about their designs and choice of plant materials. Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi River and has a rich and varied geography. This terrain supports a diverse mix of botanical species, which Georgia's gardeners have used to full advantage. In addition to seeing these treasured private spaces, you can learn invaluable tips for your own garden plans, as well as how to incorporate architectural elements such as potting sheds, greenhouses, fencing, gazebos, and more.

Private Gardens of Connecticut

Connecticut is uniquely rich in beautiful landscape, encompassing more than six hundred miles of serene shoreline along Long Island Sound, untold acres of open farmland, and the rolling hills and lakes of the famed northwest corner on the New York/Massachusetts border. The varied topography and microclimates have given rise to an unusual range of gardens.
Twenty-eight are presented here, a rare and privileged glimpse of the private retreats of prominent members of the fashion, design, arts, and business communities. Some are grand in scale, others exceedingly modest, but all have been cared for and tended with great love. None of these gardens was made overnight and many have taken years to come to fruition. The garden of the Greek god Adonis may have “one day blossomed and fruitful were the next,” but not any of the gardens featured in this book.
In an engaging and highly anecdotal text, Jane Garmey tells the story of the creation of the gardens and the pleasure the owners take in them while John Hall’s magnificent photographs of sumptuous flowers and luxuriant foliage bring them to life.

Gardens of the Hudson Valley

The majesty of the Hudson River has captivated both artists and visitors for generations, and the gardens along its banks have a special character. Those created for the Gilded Age estates are more formal; private gardens respond directly to the rolling landscape and mature forests. The area is a crucible for the development of American landscape design since the major figures—Alexander Jackson Downing, Frederick Law Olmsted, Beatrix Farrand, and Fletcher Steele—all worked in the Hudson Valley.
Gardens of the Hudson Valley focuses on the historic landscape and how gardens have been integrated into it. Photographers Steve Gross and Susan Daly have selected twenty-five gardens between Yonkers and Hudson, including famous estate gardens like Kykuit, Boscobel, the Vanderbilt Mansion, and Olana (all open to the public) and private gardens that combine sweeping views and lush plantings.
Garden writers Susan Lowry and Nancy Berner describe each of the gardens in detail, focusing on the history of the site and the strategies for design and plant materials.

The Vegetable Gardener's Bible (10th Anniversary Edition)

Ed Smith's W-O-R-D system has helped countless gardeners grow an abundance of vegetables and herbs. And those tomatoes and zucchini and basil and cucumbers have nourished countless families, neighbors, and friends with delicious, fresh produce. The Vegetable Gardener's Bible is essential reading for locavores in every corner of North America!
EVERYTHING YOU LOVED about the first edition of The Vegetable Gardener's Bible is still here: friendly, accessible language; full-color photography; comprehensive vegetable specific information in the A-to-Z section; ahead-of-its-time commitment to organic methods; and much more.
Now, Ed Smith is back with a 10th Anniversary Edition for the next generation of vegetable gardeners. New to this edition is coverage of 15 additional vegetables, including an expanded section on salad greens and more European and Asian vegetables. Readers will also find growing information on more fruits and herbs, new cultivar photographs in many vegetable entries, and a much-requested section on extending the season into the winter months. No matter how cold the climate, growers can bring herbs indoors and keep hardy greens alive in cold frames or hoop houses.
The impulse to grow vegetables is even stronger in 2009 than it was in 2000, when Storey published The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible. The financial and environmental costs of fossil fuels raise urgent questions: How far should we be shipping food? What are the health costs of petroleum-based pesticides and herbicides? Do we have to rely on megafarms that use gasoline-powered machinery to grow and harvest crops? With every difficult question, more people think, "Maybe I should grow a few vegetables of my own." This book will continue to answer all their vegetable gardening questions.

1001 Gardens You Must See Before You Die

Garden lovers and discriminating travelers will relish this armchair tour of the most beautiful and interesting gardens around the world. Succinct descriptions with stunning color photos showcase the creations of the world's outstanding landscape gardeners, architects, and garden designers. From Spain's famous gardens of the Moorish Alhambra at Granada to San Diego's Healing Garden, created for patients at the San Diego Children's Hospital, this lavishly illustrated guide will delight both lovers of natural beauty and hands-on gardeners. Among the many gardens pictured and described in this beautiful volume are:

• In the United States and Canada: Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, Boscobel in New York's Hudson Valley, Williamsburg Gardens in Virginia, Magnolia Plantation and its Gardens near Charleston, South Carolina, Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin in Wisconsin, the Toronto Botanical Garden, Pacific Undersea Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia, and many more...
• In England: The Japanese Garden in London's Holland Park, the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, Shakespeare's Garden in Stratford, London's Victoria and Albert Museum Gardens, and many more...
• In France: The Gardens of Versailles outside Paris, the Garden of Claude Monet at Giverney, Chateau de Vauville in Cherbourg, and many more...
• The rest of the world: Boboli Gardens in Florence, Italy, Potsdam Gardens near Berlin, Germany, the Taj Mahal in Agra, India, the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, Japan, and hundreds more...

Great Gardens of America

Great Gardens of America surveys some of the loveliest grounds in America and Canada, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Quebec to California, from the tropical Southeast to the industrial Midwest. The 25 gardens showcased range from 18th-century landscape gardens, such as Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in Virginia, through 20th-century creations, such as the lakeside garden at Innisfree in New York and dramatic Naumkeag in Massachusetts, to the work of exciting new designers, such as Topher Delaney in San Francisco and New Mexico's Martha Schwartz. Many of the gardens are open to the public, so readers can actually visit and draw firsthand inspiration. The others, newer domestic gardens, offer tantalizing glimpses into a glamorous world of luxurious outdoor living. Three hundred stunning color photographs by renowned garden photographer Andrea Jones accompany Tim Richardson’s insightful text.

Soil Science Simplified by Neal Eash, Cary J. Green, Aga Ravzi, and William F. Bennett

Soil Science Simplified, Fifth Edition is a significant update and revision of the classic introductory soils text. The new edition includes greater coverage of non-agricultural uses of soils ranging from municipal to engineering uses, as well as an expanded discussion of environmental uses of soils and soil conservation. In addition, the chapters covering the basic scientific aspects of soil from its physical, chemical and biological properties to basic formation will be thorougly revised and updated.
Soil Science Simplified will serve as a valuable introduction to soil science that addresses many new developments to this ever-changing field while maintaining the elements that have made it a user-friendly introductory text for more than 25 years. This text will be essential reading for anyone studying soil science as well as professionals working with this valuable resource.

About the Author

William F. Bennett is a Professor Emeritus - Soil Science, Texas Tech University.
Cary J. Green is a Professor of Soil Chemistry at Texas Tech University.
Aga Ravzi is an Associate Professor of Soil Science at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
Neal Eash is an Associate Professor of Soil Science at the University of Tennessee.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 5 edition (May 6, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813818230
• ISBN-13: 978-0813818238
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.8 inches