A worn, mud-stained gardening book tells you something. It's good.
Here are five of my favorites that have guided me over the years
In my years in the garden I’ve benefited from the advice of a multitude of people, the majority of whom I’ve never met. I know them through their books, podcasts, videos and radio interviews. It’s fair to say that without them I’d still be struggling to get things to grow, even though that remains an ongoing challenge.
I have dozens of gardening books and I’d love to pay the authors back in some way. In this spirit I thought it would be fun to list five of my favorites. There are others, which I’ll write about down the road. But these are the ones whose pages are most worn, dampened by rain, streaked with soil. That tells me something. By the way, there are also some great gardening podcasts I’ll share in the days ahead as well.
I can’t write about my first gardening book, the one that was my North Star in Vermont decades ago when I planted my first vegetable garden. I was separated from it somewhere along the way during my moves from Montpelier to New York, Warsaw, London and Washington, D.C., and sadly I can’t remember its name or author. But here’s to you, fellow gardener, wherever you are today. I hope your book is still in print!
Here are five I can remember, since they’re sitting on my desk right next to me.
The Year-round Vegetable Gardener. By Niki Jabbour.
Niki grows vegetables at her home in Nova Scotia. That alone says something about her. She greets the long, cold winters in that beautiful Canadian province not with resignation or defeat but instead embraces her climate with a resourcefulness that is an inspiration to a gardener in any climate. Her garden beds produce bountiful harvests year-round, in the heat of summer, the cold of winter and the seasons in between. She does it with careful planning, selecting the right varieties for the season, a planting strategy and ongoing care for the soil. She uses cold frames and hoop houses to keep it all going in the colder months, and her book has instructions on how to build them. The photo on the cover shows Niki kneeling in the snow in front of cold frames filled with leafy, green vegetables. Her gloved hands are holding a wooden bowl brimming with carrots, beets, leeks, onions and brussels sprouts. In addition to expanding our definition of the growing season, what I find most useful is the book’s detailed listing of dozens of vegetables with planting, growing and harvesting tips, along with a planting calendar for each. I find the calendar invaluable for reminding me how many weeks before the last spring frost to start seedlings for the spring and summer garden, and similarly when to get things in the garden before the first fall frost and guide my choices for a fall and winter garden. You need to plant earlier than you might think.
Epic Tomatoes. By Craig LeHoullier.
Craig had a career in the pharmaceutical industry before turning his attention fulltime to his real passion, growing tomatoes, which he does from his home in North Carolina. Today he’s nationally recognized as an authority on the subject. He approaches tomato growing with the precision of a chemist’s eye yet has a holistic approach to gardening and plants. It’s an irresistible combination that makes Epic Tomatoes an indispensable guide for any tomato lover. It’s filled with practical advice on pruning, growing methods and disease prevention and is illustrated by mouth-watering photographs of some of Craig’s favorite tomato varieties. The photos and descriptions of their color, taste and growth habit are a big help for any backyard gardener confronting the endless choices of tomato varieties in seed catalogs or at the garden center. Craig’s best-known for having introduced a lost variety of tomato he grew from a packet of seeds a man in Tennessee mailed to him in 1990. The man told Craig the seeds had been in a neighbor’s family for 100 years and were handed down from Cherokee Indians. Craig named the variety Cherokee Purple and today it is one of the most popular heirlooms in the United States. The book also introduced me to dwarf tomatoes, a new variety of tomatoes developed over the past two decades by Craig and others to allow gardeners to grow heirloom-quality and sized tomatoes on shorter, stouter plants that don’t ramble but fit in smaller spaces or planters. I’ve grown many in pots in my former driveway garden.
The New Organic Grower. By Eliot Coleman.
One of my first gardening books was The Garden Primer written by Eliot Coleman’s wife Barbara Damrosch. It’s so good that we purchased the revised edition a few years ago. Together, they operate a commercial market garden on Maine’s gorgeous Blue Hill peninsula. While the New Organic Grower is not as user-friendly as some gardening books – it's aimed as much for the commercial market grower as it is for the home gardener – it makes up for it with a wealth of knowledge and tips about gardening throughout the year. It introduced me to soil blocking, which Coleman helped popularize in the United States. It’s become my preferred method for starting seeds indoors (though I still often turn to whatever planting vessel is within reach). Soil blocking isn’t convenient but it produces great seedlings that you literally can pop into the garden when they’re ready. To produce soil blocks you use a handheld metal press (it’s available online and not expensive) to compress a mix of peat moss, compost, soil and sand (or pearlite) watered to the consistency of a wet snowball. Mine makes sturdy 2-inch cubes, each with a quarter-inch dowel-shaped hole. You just drop the seeds in. The value is the roots grow to the limits of the soil block without turning in on themselves as they can in plastic trays, and then quickly take off once the block is planted. It’s fun if you don’t mind making a little mess!
Plant Grow Harvest Repeat. By Meg Cowden.
I was introduced to Meg Cowden a few years ago via her informative and entertaining Instagram account called “Seed to Fork” in which she shared her experiences growing and expanding her unique garden outside Minneapolis. Meg’s joyful mission is to move off the food grid as much as possible by growing healthy and nutritious produce from spring through fall, all the while storing, freezing and canning for the winter. She’s a fierce advocate for succession planting, which means she plants a succession of plants in her vegetable beds throughout the growing season, rarely leaving a patch of soil empty. It’s the strategy described in the title of her book, Plant Grow Harvest Repeat. The book is introspective and inspirational, examining the positive role gardening can play in our lives. She organized the book around the progression of the seasons, making it a useful guide for anyone trying to map out a plan for their garden each month of the year. It’s easily explained by her easy to follow succession planting guides that lead gardener’s by the hand season-by-season. Meg also loves flowers and calls attention to the invaluable role for any garden played by the pollinating insects they attract.
The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible. By Edward C. Smith.
This is my old-school gardening book, and I mean that in the best way possible. If you want to know about compost, it’s in this book. Raised beds? Crop rotation? Soil tests? Beneficial insects? Go no further. The book was one of the first I bought after building my first raised vegetable beds outside of Washington, D.C., and for many years – before there was Instagram, podcasts, YouTube and the multitude of other ways gardeners can share their wisdom today – The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible was, well, my Bible. I still go back to it every year to consult its comprehensive plant directory of vegetables and herbs that comprise the second half of the book. Smith devotes a couple pages to virtually any vegetable you’d care to grow that are packed with easy to digest details on site selection, sowing, growing and harvesting produce, along with useful tips on things like seed germination rates and recommended soil pH ranges.