Gardening

Features gardening advice, including how to design a play-friendly garden, ideas for fun-filled theme gardens, and how to cook and preserve the garden's bounty.

Vegetable gardens can be designed for flavor AND fun! Niki Jabbour, author of the best-selling The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener, has collected 73 plans for novel and inspiring food gardens from her favorite superstar gardeners, including Amy Stewart, Amanda Thomsen, Barbara Pleasant, Dave Dewitt, and Jessi Bloom. You'll find a garden that provides salad greens 52 weeks a year, another that supplies your favorite cocktail ingredients, one that you plant on a balcony, one that encourages pollinators, one that grows 24 kinds of chile peppers, and dozens more. Each plan is fully illustrated and includes a profile of the contributor, the story behind the design, and a plant list.

Jeff Hutton shows you and your kids how to grow your own food and your favorite flowers, attract butterflies, create crafts, and more.Teach your children how to start garden seeds indoors as well as how to preparesoil, plant seeds, and transplant seedlings. Additionally, there are over a dozen fun recipes and instructions for making stepping stones, decorating egg cartonplanters, planting a sunflower maze, and much more.

Now gardeners don't have to choose between frugal and fantastic! In The Dirt-Cheap Green Thumb, Rhonda Massingham Hart provides practical, time-tested solutions that will stretch your dollar farther than you ever thought possible, even as they yield beautiful, bountiful plants. From starting seeds to preserving produce, from composting to conserving water, Hart's advice ensures that you won't waste a scrap of time or money. Perfect for everyone from novices to experts, whether you are growing food, flowers, house plants, or landscape plants.

The easy way to succeed at urban gardening A townhouse yard, a balcony, a fire escape, a south-facing window-even a basement apartment can all be suitable locations to grow enough food to save a considerable amount of money and enjoy the freshest, healthiest produce possible. Urban Gardening For Dummies helps you make the most of limited space through the use of proven small-space gardening techniques that allow gardeners to maximize yield while minimizing space.

SFG, new and improved -- Plan your garden -- Building boxes and structures -- Mel's mix, essential for square foot gardening success -- How to plant your all new square foot garden -- Growing and harvesting -- Vertical gardening -- Extending the seasons -- Special gardens & gardeners -- Appendix. At a glance vegetables ; At a glance herbs & flowers.

Want to spruce up indoor or outdoor space with annuals, perennials, vegetables, and succulents? Get clear, concise step-by-step instructions for cultivating delightful gardens in everything from a redwood window box to a hanging basket to an old watering can.

Growing edibles indoors -- Microgreens, shoots, herbs, wheatgrass, sprouts, and mushrooms -- Radishes, carrots, tomatoes, and other crops.
Includes index.

Fairy gardens are enjoying an astonishing surge in popularity and now you can begin making your own enchanting miniature landscapes, complete with pint-sized accessories, diminutive plants, and quaint fairy figures. Gardeners Julie Bawden-Davis and Beverly Turner provide you with step-by-step instructions for creating a magical garden that will attract Thumbelina herself!

Interviews with twelve gardeners reveal their approaches to growing vegetables and flowers in the harsh climate of the Midwest.

This comprehensive manual provides practical information on flower gardens, fruit and vegetable gardens, and construction and maintenance of gardens, among other topics.

The specialized knowledge of over sixty experts is incorporated in a comprehensive gardening guide covering soil, climate factors, garden planning and design, tools and equipment, cultivation and propagation procedures, pest control, and gardening terminology.

Whether you have a charming container garden or an elegant topiary, this oversized, 448-page, photo-packed guide explodes with 1,000 practical tips on making it bloom more beautifully with less effort and time. From water gardens to roof havens, a staggering variety of design and planting choices burst from the pages.

Since 1936 and the first publication of Norman Taylor's classic Taylor's Encyclopedia of Gardening, the Taylor's guides have presented authoritative horticultural information. This one-volume reference features more than 3,000 detailed descriptions of species and essential suggestions for creating a garden. It is the only general encyclopedia to approach garden pests and problems with an environmental eye. This reference is one that gardeners will turn to time after time.

From choosing a garden style to selecting and caring for plants, here is everything the gardener needs to know in this comprehensive, lavishly illustrated, and eminently practical encyclopedia. 2,000 full-color photos.

It may be a garden you inherited when you bought a new house. Or it might be the one youve neglected for years. Or perhaps its one youve simply grown tired of. Garden Makeovers is an indispensable guide to assessing what kind of garden you have, determining what options-and limitations-it offers, sizing up your own level of interest in working on the garden, and creating the best garden space for you.

From ground covers to shade trees, top choices for great home gardens in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Describes various types of latticework fences, screens, summerhouses, and other garden structures and the vines and other climbing plants used with them.

Photographic tour with text of artist Tasha Tudor's garden in Vermont. Contains practical gardening tips and anecdotes.

Gardening is often a labor of love...but you'll love it even more with less labor! With a few fast and easy techniques, existing gardens can flourish beyond recognition. Just follow these tips on what to keep and what to scrap, shortcuts to solving common problems, and innovative planting schemes that work just about anywhere. Transform a garden's entire structure with readily built features, mechanize tasks, and introduce garden-friendly plants that suppress weeds. Quick-fix "garden therapy" focuses on renewing every important element: add year-round color rapidly, personalize the space with distinctive ornaments, find the potential in what's already there, and even tidy up unkempt lawns and other signs of neglect. You'll spend fewer hours working, but every one will really count!

The Garden Trellis is an exquisitely illustrated, yet very practical garden gift book. Within its covers, gardeners will be inspired to incorporate small trellises in their gardens and will learn how to build nine simple but elegant designs. A section of thirty fully-illustrated plant profiles will help them choose vines--honeysuckle or roses, porcelain berries or moon flowers--that are appropriate for their gardens and for particular trellis designs.

Your First Garden is a primer on the basic elements of landscape design and garden creation: planning for scale and balance, color selection, and architectural features are all landscape elements that homeowners must understand.

A guide for the average homeowner explains how to maintain a healthy and beautiful yard without devoting excessive time to its care, with chapters that cover watering and fertilizing, trees and shrubs, flowers, vegetables, and environmental concerns.

Gardening at Sissinghurst unravels, for the first time, the elements that lie behind the garden's horticultural distinction. With invaluable inside information from head gardeners past and present, Tony Lord explores the design, development, planting, and maintenance of Sissinghurst's garden rooms. Each offers a unique lesson in achieving a distinctive style and atmosphere - from the exuberant intimacy of the Cottage Garden, through the abundant romance of the Rose Garden and the enameled brilliance of the spring bulbs in the Lime Walk, to the elegance of the White Garden.

As you make your way through the pages of ORGANIC FLOWER GARDENING, you'll discover that this book is more than just a gardener's guide to beautiful blooms. It's a unique flower book because, in addition to all the gardening and flower basics, it explains the marvelous interplay in nature that makes for an attractive and healthy garden. ORGANIC FLOWER GARDENING discusses the significance of mulches and marigolds, compost and camomile, ladybugs and lacewings. It explains the intermingling of flowers with one another, with other plants, with the life in the soil and in the branches of trees. It shows how to create and maintain a garden that is lovely and harmonious, lovely and bird attracting, lovely and pest repellent, all at once! Informative, yet distinctively personal, Foster explains how to enhance outdoor space with flowering plants of all sorts--annuals, perennials, biennials, bulbs, roses, and flowering shrubs, trees, and ground covers--as she shares with readers her own favorites and relates her experiences growing and enjoying them. She gives guidelines for choosing ornamentals and planning gardens for color almost the year round. For those who want organic gardening basics, she provides explanations of good soil and how to get it, disease and pest protection and how to provide it, compost and how to make it. Foster spells out other gardening techniques with reminders throughout that an understanding and respect for living things is a important to good garden housekeeping as a practical knowledge of what to do. In the special garden section, Foster shows how to bring out the best of untamed, natural forms by creating inviting rock, shade, water, and seaside gardens. She discusses the intricasies of wildflower gardening and explains how to select, propagate, and provide the special conditions in which these wild beauties thrive. Also included are many detailed lists, describing various plants and their attributes.

Square Foot Gardening presents a new way to garden in less space with less work.

Helpful hints of choosing, cultivating, and caring for a variety of plants in shady environments are accompanied by 275 full-color photographs, an encyclopedia of more than 250 shade-loving plants, plant lists, and tips on design fundamentals, color schemes, seasonal gardens, and more. 25,000 first printing.

This is a season-by-season approach for the all-weather container gardener, by the author of "Container Gardening". Starting with the basics, the book gives a survey of the range of containers available and the plants best suited to container gardening. The heart of the book is a catalogue of planting projects for every conceivable type of container. Throughout, photo-essays give ideas for enhancing different parts of the garden with a well chosen container arrangement.

Garden planning and design -- Ornamental trees -- Ornamental shrubs -- Climbing plants -- The rose garden -- Perennials annuals and biennials -- The rock garden -- Bulbous plants -- The water garden -- Cacti and other succulents -- The lawn -- The herb garden -- The vegetable garden -- The fruit garden -- The indoor garden -- Tools and equipment -- Greenhouses and frames -- Structures and surfaces -- Climate and the garden -- Soils and fertilizers -- Principles of propagation -- Plant problems -- Basic botany.
Includes index.

Discusses the principles and techniques of container gardening, and provides advice on choosing, planting, and cultivating different types of containers.

Provides information on developing, planting, and maintaining a garden for those with limited mobility.

Ornamental Grass Gardening is about the use and advantages of ornamental grass gardens. It details the various use, types and effects by the use of various grasses in a garden. It is very popular with avid gardeners as well as those in the business that want to learn more about grasses and the advantage of grasses in a garden, the marvelous effect on ones landscape as well as the beauty with low maintenance.

Discusses water gardening and gives examples of the different types of containers used, and the appropriate plants for this type of gardening.

Provides a range of practical solutions to eighty common gardening problems, from poor soil and lighting challenges to hostile winds and pest control, sharing additional information on the costs, time, and difficulty levels of each solution. 12,500 first printing.

A brief history of vegetable competitions -- Why not give it a go? -- Beans -- Beets -- Cabbage -- Cucumbers -- Eggplant -- Onions -- Peppers -- Pumpkins -- Squash -- Tomatoes.

How can you keep from dragging your garden hose over newly planted seedling? Where can you find cheap garden stakes? What can you use to keep the family cat out of your freshly tilled flower beds? This book answers these questions and hundreds more with unique new tips. Plentiful illustrations make for great browsing, while subject-area organization leads you to specific problem solutions. This book is sure to spur you on to improve the bloom and beauty of your garden.

"Are you facing drought or water shortages? Gardening with Less Water offers simple, inexpensive, low-tech techniques for watering your garden much more efficiently -- using up to 90% less water for the same results. With illustrated step-by-step instructions, David Bainbridge shows you how to install buried clay pots and pipes, wicking systems, and other porous containers that deliver water directly to a plant's roots with no or minimal evaporation. These systems are available at hardware stores and garden centers; are easy to set up and use; and work for garden beds, container gardens, and trees, "

A guide to growing healthy perennials discusses choosing and cultivating plants and includes a plant-by-plant guide with details on growing both popular and unusual plants.