Get Growing with Mother Earth News!

For years, millions of readers have turned to Mother Earth News for trusted advice on growing vegetables and fruits. This book harnesses decades of wisdom, bringing together all the indispensable techniques, complete growing guides, helpful tips, useful photographs, and inspiring illustrations for which Mother Earth News is known.

Plan for self-sufficiency with a garden focused on edibles! Choose from a variety of plans for kitchen gardens, browse strategies for small-space gardening, or up your gardening game by installing and maintaining permanent beds. Soil concerns? Get the dirt on building fertile soil, soil pH, compost, vermicompost – even biochar. Longtime gardeners are sure to find something new, from vertical gardening to plans for extending the seasons.

That’s right, garden through the seasons with dozens of vegetable- and fruit-specific growing guides. Start with your favorites or learn to love something new (Asian greens or fruit trees, anyone?). In slower-growing or more challenging seasons, Mother is there to help. Whether you need to know the best vegetables to grow in the shade or the top gardening tips for soil health in winter, this book has it all.

Fight garden pests and increase your yields the natural way with this tried and true technique!

Planting vegetables and flowers together is one of the oldest ways to create a healthy, bountiful garden, but there's more to the method than you might think. Vegetables Love Flowers will walk you through the ins and outs of companion planting, from how it works to which plants go together and how to grow the best garden for your climate.

With the right information and some careful planning, you can help your plants thrive--and beautify your garden in the process.

Blending history with expert reportage, she traces the disparate threads that have woven corn into the fabric of our diet, politics, economy, science, and cuisine. At the same time she explores its future as a source of energy and the foundation of seemingly limitless green technologies.

Straw bale gardening is an inexpensive, low-maintenance way to grow a bounty of food in a small space. All you need is a bale of straw, some fertilizer, and your favorite vegetable seeds! Craig LeHoullier’s step-by-step instructions show you how to do everything from sourcing the straw and setting up your bale to planting, dealing with weeds and pests, and harvesting.

At Clay Bottom Farm, author Ben Hartman and staff practice kaizen, or continuous improvement, cutting out more waste—of time, labor, space, money, and more—every year and aligning their organic production more tightly with customer demand. Applied alongside other lean principles originally developed by the Japanese auto industry, the end result has been increased profits and less work. In this field-guide companion to his award-winning first book, The Lean Farm, Hartman shows market vegetable growers in even more detail how Clay Bottom Farm implements lean thinking in every area of their work, including using kanbans, or replacement signals, to maximize land use; germination chambers to reduce defect waste; and right-sized machinery to save money and labor and increase efficiency. From finding land and assessing infrastructure needs to selling perfect produce at the farmers market, The Lean Farm Guide to Growing Vegetables digs deeper into specific, tested methods for waste-free farming that not only help farmers become more successful but make the work more enjoyable. These methods include: •Using Japanese paper pot transplanters •Building your own germinating chambers •Leaning up your greenhouse •Making and applying simple composts •Using lean techniques for pest and weed control •Creating Heijunka, or load-leveling calendars for efficient planning Farming is not static, and improvement requires constant change. The Lean Farm Guide to Growing Vegetables offers strategies for farmers to stay flexible and profitable even in the face of changing weather and markets. Much more than a simple exercise in cost-cutting, lean farming is about growing better, not cheaper, food—the food your customers want.

Savor your best tomato harvest ever! Craig LeHoullier, tomato adviser for Seed Savers Exchange, offers everything a tomato enthusiast needs to know about growing more than 200 varieties of tomatoes — from sowing seeds and planting to cultivating and collecting seeds at the end of the season. He also offers a comprehensive guide to the various pests and diseases of tomatoes and explains how best to avoid them. No other book offers such a detailed look at the specifics of growing tomatoes, with beautiful photographs and helpful tomato profiles throughout.

The apple is one of the most iconic fruits, traditionally picked on cool fall days and used in pies, crisps, ciders, and more. And there is a vast world of varieties that goes well beyond the common grocery store offerings. With names like American Beauty, Carter’s Blue, and Fallawater, and flavors ranging from sweet to tart, this treasure trove of unique apples is ripe for discovery.

Win the blue ribbon every time! Master Gardener Jodi Torpey offers all the information you need to grow champion vegetables: beans, beets, cabbages, cucumbers, eggplants, onions, peppers, pumpkins, squash, and tomatoes. She covers everything from choosing the right varieties and scheduling planting dates to harvesting, preparing, and transporting your produce. She also walks you through every aspect of competitive showing, with useful tips for thinking like a judge. This book will delight you with lively photos of mammoth pumpkins, truly gigantic onions, perfectly pear-shaped eggplants, and the farmers and gardeners who grow them. Filled with the excitement of a county fair, it’s a fun read as well as a solid guide to growing the biggest, tastiest, best-looking vegetables for miles around.

In this book from kitchen-garden guru, Joyce Russell is 30 decorative vegetable-growing projects that anyone can make and enjoy. All the projects are devised to extend the season, protect crops from pests or improve yields. Apart from the obvious cost-savings from growing or making your own, the desire to work with craft fulfills the need to improve your patch of land. These compelling projects transform your vegetable plot into somewhere more productive, more attractive, and more secure.

This book is for anyone wishing to learn the no dig method from the beginning, or to consolidate what they already know: it helps readers to see the simplicity of no dig, why it works so well, and how much time they can save. The course has six modules and totals 18 lessons, each one packed with easy-to-understand theory and practical advice. The lessons are beautifully illustrated with fully explained photos from Charles’s no dig gardens. At the end of each lesson there is a multiple-choice quiz to consolidate learning, with answers in the appendix. This book will have a sequel, based on Charles’s second online course.

Countertop Gardens will make you an expert in the world of indoor gardening, walking you through the challenges, benefits, and how-tos of growing inside and presenting the wide array of methods available. In addition to going over the pros and cons of a wide range of ready-made hydroponic, aquaponic, and vertical gardening systems, author Shelley Levis shows you how to make your own DIY setups, ranging from simple space-saving container designs to more creative and complex soil-free solutions.

This graphically rich guide provides inspiration and advice to aspiring growers through photographs of successful rooftop farms and gardens, as well as interviews with industry professionals. Easy-to-use checklists and a decision tree are included to help gauge the viability of each unique rooftop opportunity.

The birds, mammals, reptiles, and insects that inhabit our yards and gardens are overwhelmingly on our side—they are not our enemies, but instead our allies. They pollinate our flowers and vegetable crops, and they keep pests in check. In Garden Allies, Frédérique Lavoipierre shares fascinating portraits of these creatures, describing their life cycles and showing how they keep the garden’s ecology in balance. Also included is helpful information on how to nurture and welcome these valuable creatures into your garden. With beautiful pen-and-ink drawings by Craig Latker, Garden Allies invites you to make friends with the creatures that fill your garden—the reward is a renewed sense of nature’s beauty and a garden humming with life.

In Gathering the Desert readers will discover that the bounty of the desert is much more than meets the eye-whether found in the luscious fruit of the stately organpipe cactus or in the lowly tepary bean.

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Grocery Gardening includes garden planning, planting, preparing, preserving and nutritional information for each of the more than twenty selected edibles. In addition to tips on when to harvest home grown vegetables, the authors offer advice on how to select the freshest produce at the local market, and select complementary ingredients to combine with your home-grown edibles. Jean Ann Van Krevelen, together with her team of food and gardening experts and their community of readers, encourage gardeners and non-gardeners alike to plan meals based on what is in season. Whether you buy local or grow your own, the recipes will delight your family with seasonal freshness. Also included is a chapter on preserving your harvest, with tips for freezing, drying, canning and preserving.

Grow your own apples, figs, plums, cherries, pears, apricots, and peaches in even the smallest backyard! Expert pruner Ann Ralph reveals a simple yet revolutionary secret that keeps an ordinary fruit tree much smaller than normal. These great little trees take up less space, require less care, offer an easy harvest, and make a fruitful addition to any home landscape.