Best of
Gardening

2022

Garden Maker: Growing a Life of Beauty and Wonder with Flowers


Christie Purifoy - 2022
      From the beginning God made a garden, so it’s no surprise if you feel closer to Him with your hands in the dirt and the sun on your back. There is something profoundly soul-satisfying about creating and cultivating beauty. If you long to experience more splendor in your life, you can grow some of your very own.   Join kindred spirit Christie Purifoy as she helps you unearth the simple delights of growing garden flowers, from preparing and planning to creating beautiful bouquets and other arrangements. Lavishly photographed and lovingly written, this all-seasons guide invites you to discover the innumerable joys and wonders to be found in the flower garden.

Grow More Food: A Vegetable Gardener's Guide to Getting the Biggest Harvest Possible from a Space of Any Size


Colin McCrate - 2022
    Along with chapters devoted to the Five Tenets of a Productive Gardener (Plan Well to Get the Most from Your Garden; Maximize Production in Each Bed; Get the Most out of Every Plant; Scale-up Tools and Systems for Efficiency; and Expand and Extend the Harvest), the book contains interactive tools that home gardeners can use to assist them in determining how, when, and what to plant; evaluating crop health; and planning and storing the harvest. For today’s vegetable gardeners who want to grow as much of their own food as possible, this guide offers expert advice and strategies for cultivating a garden that supplies what they need.

Grow Your Own Medicine


Ava Green - 2022
    Kate Bensinger is a nurse and obtained a degree in Naturopathy with an Herbal Emphasis. Together, they set out to write the book they wish had been available for them starting out.This is for every aspiring herbalist.Indoors, backyards, or on a farm, you will become self-sufficient by growing your own medicinal and culinary herbs. As prices continue to soar, you can save money or build a business.When you’re the grower……there’s no need to worry about additives or GMOs.Benefits:- Almost no side effects compared to conventional meds- Become empowered and be your own herbal dispensary.- Learn the medicinal, culinary, decorative, scent and dye uses of 50+ herbs- Be the healer your family needs- How to maintain your herb garden without chemicals- How to prevent and treat the root causes of ailments instead of silencing the symptoms with conventional medsYou’ll love the beautiful illustrations, and this easy-to-understand beginner’s guide will make it a breeze to Grow Your Own Medicine

Gardening for Everyone: Growing Vegetables, Herbs, and More at Home


Julia Watkins - 2022
    Here sustainability expert Julia Watkins shares everything you need to know to grow your own vegetables, fruits, and herbs (as well as wildflowers and other beneficial companion plants). The book covers all the nuts and bolts of creating and caring for your garden—planning, building, planting, tending, and harvesting—followed by a deeper dive into the plants themselves: demystifying annuals vs. perennials, cold-weather vs. warm-weather veggies, and profiles of favorite crops. Throughout, Julia offers tips for creating an eco-friendly and sustainable garden (such as vermicomposting, no-till “lasagna” gardening, and attracting pollinators), plus some fun and unexpected hands-on projects like how to build a bean teepee, make wildflower seed paper, and enjoy refreshing herbal lemonade ice pops.

Four-Season Food Gardening: How to grow vegetables, fruits, and herbs year-round


Misilla dela Llana - 2022
    Using season-extension techniques, such as cold frames, mini hoop houses, and thick mulches, combined with a thoughtful mixture of annual and perennial crops, you’ll discover that eating from your backyard through all 12 months is possible. With a hearty dose of enthusiasm and expertise, author Misilla dela Llana of YouTube’s Learn to Grow channel presents this season-by-season guide to growing edible plants, covering everything from what tasks and what crops are best for each harvesting season to step-by-step DIY projects for structures and methods to temper weather extremes. With Four-Season Food Gardening you can keep on growing, no matter what challenges Mother Nature presents. Inside, you’ll find info on:Veggies you can harvest in the dead of winterFoods that come from perennial plants you harvest from for many yearsHow to build and use cold frames and other season extenders to prolong your harvestTips for incorporating layers of edible plants to maximize spacePruning, planting, and maintenance advice for dozens of cropsSeasonal maintenance and harvesting know-how from a proBuild a forest of food in your backyard and reap the delicious rewards for years to come!

The Native American Herbalist’s Bible • 7-in-1 Companion to Herbal Medicine: The Only Gardener and Forager Guide to Native Herbs and Wildflowers You’ll Ever Need to Craft Traditional Herbal Remedies


Linda Osceola Naranjo - 2022
    

To Boldly Grow: Finding Joy, Adventure, and Dinner in Your Own Backyard


Tamar Haspel - 2022
    To Boldly Grow is "part memoir, part how-to guide and wholly delightful" (Washington Post). Journalist and self-proclaimed "crappy gardener" Tamar Haspel is on a mission: to show us that raising or gathering our own food is not as hard as it's often made out to be. When she and her husband move from Manhattan to two acres on Cape Cod, they decide to adopt a more active approach to their diet: raising chickens, growing tomatoes, even foraging for mushrooms and hunting their own meat. They have more ambition than practical know-how, but that's not about to stop them from trying...even if sometimes their reach exceeds their (often muddy) grasp.With "first-hand food" as her guiding principle, Haspel embarks on a grand experiment to stop relying on experts to teach her the ropes (after all, they can make anything grow), and start using her own ingenuity and creativity. Some of her experiments are a rousing success (refining her own sea salt). Others are a spectacular failure (the turkey plucker engineered from an old washing machine). Filled with practical tips and hard-won wisdom, To Boldly Grow allows us to journey alongside Haspel as she goes from cluelessness to competence, learning to scrounge dinner from the landscape around her and discovering that a direct connection to what we eat can utterly change the way we think about our food--and ourselves.

Plant Grow Harvest Repeat: Grow a Bounty of Vegetables, Fruits, and Flowers by Mastering the Art of Succession Planting


Meg Cowden - 2022
      Drawing inspiration from succession in natural landscapes, Meg McAndrews Cowden teaches you how to implement lessons from these dynamic systems in your home garden. You’ll learn how to layer succession across your perennial and annual crops; maximize the early growing season; determine the sequence to plant and replant in summer; and incorporate annual and perennial flowers to benefit wildlife and ensure efficient pollination. You’ll also find detailed, seasonal sowing charts to inform your garden planning, so you can grow more anywhere, regardless of your climate.  Plant Grow Harvest Repeat will inspire you to create an even more productive, beautiful, and enjoyable garden across the seasons—every vegetable gardener’s dream.

Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming


Liz Carlisle - 2022
    For one woman, that’s meant learning her tribe’s history to help bring back the buffalo. For another, it’s meant preserving forest purchased by her great-great-uncle, among the first wave of African Americans to buy land. Others are rejecting monoculture to grow corn, beans, and squash the way farmers in Mexico have done for centuries. Still others are rotating crops for the native cuisines of those who fled the “American wars” in Southeast Asia.   In Healing Grounds, Liz Carlisle tells the stories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers who are reviving their ancestors’ methods of growing food—techniques long suppressed by the industrial food system. These farmers are restoring native prairies, nurturing beneficial fungi, and enriching soil health. While feeding their communities and revitalizing cultural ties to land, they are steadily stitching ecosystems back together and repairing the natural carbon cycle. This, Carlisle shows, is the true regenerative agriculture – not merely a set of technical tricks for storing CO2 in the ground, but a holistic approach that values diversity in both plants and people.   Cultivating this kind of regenerative farming will require reckoning with our nation’s agricultural history—a history marked by discrimination and displacement. And it will ultimately require dismantling power structures that have blocked many farmers of color from owning land or building wealth.    The task is great, but so is its promise. By coming together to restore these farmlands, we can not only heal our planet, we can heal our communities and ourselves.

Grow Now: How We Can Save Our Health, Communities, and Planet—One Garden at a Time


Emily Murphy - 2022
    Regenerating life begins with our hands, the soil, and our heart. Take this book and go outside, stay outside, and transform.” —Paul Hawken, author of Drawdown and RegenerationDid you know you can have a garden that’s equal parts food source and wildlife haven? In Grow Now, Emily Murphy shares easy-to-follow principles for regenerative gardening that foster biodiversity and improve soil health. She also shows how every single yard mirrors and connects to the greater ecosystem around us.   No-dig growing, composting and mulching smartly, and planting a variety of edible perennials that attract bees and butterflies are all commonsense techniques everyone can use to grow positive change. You'll also find detailed advice on increasing your nature quotient, choosing plants that cycle more carbon back into the soil, selecting a broader variety of vegetables and fruits to improve overall soil fertility, rethinking space devoted to lawns, and adding companion plants for pollinators to rewild any plot of land. Exquisitely photographed and filled with helpful lists and sidebars, Grow Now is an actionable, hopeful, and joyful roadmap for growing our way to individual climate contributions. Gardening is climate activism!

The Regenerative Garden: 80 Practical Projects for Creating a Self-sustaining Garden Ecosystem


Stephanie Rose - 2022
    The main goal of permaculture is to turn your space into a functioning ecosystem that’s less reliant on external resources and better able to sustain itself through many seasons of growth and change as it resists pests, diseases, and climate extremes. Whatever the size of your space, from a tiny patio garden to a big backyard, and whether you grow food, flowers, shrubs, trees, or a combination of all, The Regenerative Garden is here to help you become a better, more eco-conscious gardener.Through 80 DIY projects, author Stephanie Rose of the popular website Garden Therapy introduces you to basic backyard permaculture concepts in an easy-to-follow, logical way. Each of the six chapters represents a living element of the garden, capable of playing a valuable role in its constant regeneration, including soil, water, plants, climate, ethics, and community. As you check these projects off your to-do list, you’ll find you’ve reduced your long-term work load, conserved water and other resources, turned your yard into a habitat for wildlife, and learned to grow perennial foods in creative ways.The 80 featured projects include step-by-step instructions on how to:Employ intensive planting to reduce weeding and watering choresUse living mulches to amend the soilBuild self-watering planters and wicking beds to reduce water useInstall a rain garden to catch runoffPlant a wildlife hedge to support creatures and create a windbreak and noise bufferCompost projects and systems to repurpose waste on-siteMake a butterfly migration station to support pollinators of all sorts A healthy, organic, regenerative garden is a perfect example of a self-sustaining ecosystem; everything works in tandem, is intricately connected, and comes full circle to create its own never-ending cycle of life.

Behold Our Magical Garden: Poems Fresh from a School Garden


Allan Wolf - 2022
    They’ll be spurred to grab their own gardening tools, drop in some seeds, encounter a few insects, gather fresh vegetables, and find a whole lot of magic. Allan Wolf’s playful poems and Daniel Duncan’s whimsically detailed, welcoming illustrations combine in a charming celebration of the many wonders and lessons to be learned from a school garden. For further inspiration, engaging notes on the poems and an author’s note on jotting down observations can be found in the back matter.Witty and inspiring, Allan Wolf’s upbeat poems are poised to cultivate a new crop of gardeners, aided by Daniel Duncan’s bountiful illustrations.

The View from Federal Twist: A New Way of Thinking About Gardens, Nature and Ourselves


James Golden - 2022
    It is a naturalistic garden that has no utilitarian or leisure uses and the site is not an obvious choice for a garden (heavy clay soil, poorly drained: quick death for any plants not ecologically suited to it). The physical garden, its plants and its features, is of course an appealing and pleasant place to be but Federal Twist's real charm and significance lie in its intangible aspects: its changing qualities and views, the moods and emotions it evokes, and its distinctive character and sense of place. This book charts the author's journey in making such a garden. How he made a conscious decision not to improve the land, planted competitive plants into rough grass, experimented with sustainable plant communities. And how he worked with light to provoke certain moods and allowed the energy of the place, chance, and randomness to have its say. Part experimental horticulturist and part philosopher, James Golden has written an important book for ecological gardeners and anyone interested in exploring the relationship between gardens, nature, and ourselves.