40 Projects for Building Your Backyard Homestead
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A companion volume to Backyard Homesteading, 40 Projects for Building Your Backyard Homestead provides details on how to build more than 40 projects including garden structures and planter units.
All New Square Foot Gardening, 3rd Edition, Fully Updated
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The Complete Guide to Companion Planting
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The idea of companion planting has arisen in the gardening community in recent years as an extremely viable new take on how plants should situated, grown, and cultivated. Matching certain plants together and separating others, as outlined in studies such as the National Sustainable Agriculture Society's report on the subject that shows each crop with at least three companionable crops and as many as four incompatible crops. Whether you are planting Tomatoes and Onions or Carrots and Corn, the proper pairing of your plants can have a major impact on your eventual harvest and the quality of your vegetables. This book shows you, the avid gardener, everything you need to know to effectively pair your crops in a way that ensures there are no incompatibilities and that you get the most out of every seed. You will learn the basics of crop rotation and how it has been used since the dawn of cultivation almost 12,000 years ago to maintain the integrity of soil and harvests. You will learn how companion planting is an extension of this basic format and how it works in tandem with natural conditions and plant minerals to create the best produce. You will learn about how to prepare your garden and how to set the right system in place. You will learn, via a chart and a great deal of detail, about each possible combination, the best possible companion plants as well as which plants are largely incompatible. You will learn about how perennials and shrubs coexist and the fundamentals of companion planting care and seasonal care of your plants. From the top tips and methods for this style of gardening to which plants bring good insects and which ones keep pests away, you will learn everything you need to know to plot out and plant your perfect garden. Atlantic Publishing is a small, independent publishing company based in Ocala, Florida. Founded over twenty years ago in the company presidentâe(tm)s garage, Atlantic Publishing has grown to become a renowned resource for non-fiction books. Today, over 450 titles are in print covering subjects such as small business, healthy living, management, finance, careers, and real estate. Atlantic Publishing prides itself on producing award winning, high-quality manuals that give readers up-to-date, pertinent information, real-world examples, and case studies with expert advice. Every book has resources, contact information, and web sites of the products or companies discussed.
Encyclopedia of Planting Combinations
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A comprehensive and practical guide -- essential. Even the experienced gardener can be stumped when considering which plants to put where. Confidence in working with plant combinations can mean the difference between a mediocre garden and one that sings. The Encyclopedia of Planting Combinations is the perfect tool to help gardeners create a stunning garden. Rich with inspiration and practical advice, the expanded and updated edition includes: An 18-page analysis on combining plants according to location, soil, climate and seasons An 18-page analysis of planting styles, with instructions on how to re-create many of the combinations shown in the book -- perennials, meadow planting, matrix planting, grasses and more 12 pages on the leading innovators in combination planting, including Piet Oudolf, Penelope Hobhouse and Beth Chatto An additional 300 color photographs Garden designers' signature combinations -- and why they work An updated easy-to-use layout that features more prominent at-a-glance symbols and spotlights plant characteristics and cultivation requirements. This comprehensive directory and cultivation guide provides 4,000 combinations for beautiful and successful plantings, with entries fully cross-referenced. With authoritative and imaginative text, superb photographs and thousands of planting combinations, the Encyclopedia of Planting Combinations is ideal for gardeners at all experience levels.
The encyclopedia of planting combinations : the ultimate visual guide to plant harmony
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Good Neighbors: companion planting for gardeners
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Plant Partners: science-based companion planting strategies for the vegetable garden
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2021 AHS Book Award Winner Companion planting has a long history of use by gardeners, but the explanation of why it works has been filled with folklore and conjecture. Plant Partners delivers a research-based rationale for this ever-popular growing technique, offering dozens of ways you can use scientifically tested plant partnerships to benefit your whole garden. Through an enhanced understanding of how plants interact with and influence each other, this guide suggests specific plant combinations that improve soil health and weed control, decrease pest damage, and increase biodiversity, resulting in real and measurable impacts in the garden.
The Self-Sustaining Garden: the guide to matrix planting
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This book explores the theme that the plants themselves can do much of the hard work gardeners believe is an essential part of gardening. The Self-Sustaining Garden advocates using plants as partners in self-sustaining communities to create low maintenance gardens rather than being a slave to spades and hoes. In a series of compelling case studies, Peter Thompson shows how to transform a conventional garden into a self-sustaining garden. Updated from the original edition (published in 1997), The Self-Sustaining Garden brings together an explanation of the universal principles of matrix planting with specific applications and informative chapters on soil health and biological controls, and shows how to pull all the ingredients together into a strong, self-sustaining design.
Vegetables Love Flowers
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An indispensable introduction to one of the oldest, yet most radical, ways to improve and beautify your vegetable garden.
Crockett's Tool Shed: Jim Crockett's guide to the best in gardening equipment
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Garden Tools
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Garden tools are inseparable from gardens, and yet, while the history of gardens has been exhaustively explored, the story of garden tools has been virtually ignored - until now. As authors Suzanne Slesin and Guillaume Pellerin reveal in this lushly designed and nostalgia-filled volume, embedded in these familiar, everyday tools is a rich history that documents the tastes and passions of gardeners through the ages. Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs of garden tools, as well as with vintage lithographs, engravings, posters, ads, and even decorative plates depicting garden implements, the book follows the gardening cycle, from Preparing the Earth to Harvesting, and each chapter features the traditional tools used in that phase of gardening. The Sowing chapter, for instance, presents an array of dibbers, trowels, seeders, and terra-cotta pots, while the Pruning chapter offers a host of knives, grafters, pincers, saws, scythes, hatchets, billhooks, and a mind-boggling variety of pruners. Today, vintage garden tools are being rediscovered and appreciated anew as much for their ingeniousness as for their sculptural and timeless form. Garden Tools casts these humble objects in a whole new light, and anyone who loves to dig a spade into the earth or prune a rosebush will find the book irresistibly compelling.
Garden Tools and Equipment / The Best of Fine gardening
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A collection of articles from "Fine Gardening" magazine which suggests the best tools for each gardening project and how to use them. It also contains a variety of useful gardening tips.
Great Garden Gadgets : make-it-yourself gizmos and projects
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Every gardener loves a gadget, especially one made right at home. Great Garden Gadgets is packed with clear step-by-step instructions and how-to illustrations for creating hundreds of nifty gizmos and gardening aids from household items and other common materials. Created just for the trade, this attractive, affordable paperback is the only book on the market that focuses entirely on do-it-yourself items for the garden. The projects range in difficulty, from simple devices anyone can do (for example, make a seed tape out of toilet paper) to more challenging projects like row cover frames, some of which require power tools. All the projects use common household items, from PVC piping and bed-sheets to paintbrushes and toilet paper. A repeating feature, "Recycle It!", offers fast and fun ways to utilize basement castaways: Transform an old Frisbee into a plant saucer or butterfly bath, or use old license plates as a garden pick-up tool. All the ideas in Great Garden Gadgets were gleaned from real gardeners -- including many urban and small-space gardeners -- so readers can dig right in, confident that their homemade gadgets will really work.
A History of the Garden in Fifty Tools
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A green thumb is not the only tool one needs to garden well--at least that's what the makers of gardening catalogs and the designers of the dizzying aisle displays in lawn- and-garden stores would have us believe. Need to plant a bulb, aerate some soil, or keep out a hungry critter? Well, there's a specific tool for almost everything. But this isn't just a product of today's consumer era, since the very earliest gardens, people have been developing tools to make planting and harvesting more efficient and to make flora more beautiful and trees more fruitful. In A History of the Garden in Fifty Tools, Bill Laws offers entertaining and colorful anecdotes of implements that have shaped our gardening experience since the beginning. As Laws reveals, gardening tools have coevolved with human society, and the story of these fifty individual tools presents an innovative history of humans and the garden over time. Laws takes us back to the Neolithic age, when the microlith, the first "all-in-one" tool was invented. Consisting of a small sharp stone blade that was set into a handle made of wood, bone, or antler, it was a small spade that could be used to dig, clip, and cut plant material. We find out that wheelbarrows originated in China in the second century BC, and their basic form has not changed much since. He also describes how early images of a pruning knife appear in Roman art, in the form of a scythe that could cut through herbs, vegetables, fruits, and nuts and was believed to be able to tell the gardener when and what to harvest. Organized into five thematic chapters relating to different types of gardens: the flower garden, the kitchen garden, the orchard, the lawn, and ornamental gardens, the book includes a mix of horticulture and history, in addition to stories featuring well-known characters--we learn about Henry David Thoreau's favorite hoe, for example. A History of the Garden in Fifty Tools will be a beautiful gift for any home gardener and a reassuring reminder that gardeners have always struggled with the same quandaries.
The Scything Handbook: learn how to cut grass, mow meadows, & harvest grain with a scythe
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The Zen approach to mowing lawns, wacking weeds, harvesting crops, and building modern homesteader abs! Dreading the weekly law mow? Need to whack the weeds in your orchard? Cringing at the drudgery and incessant blare of the mower? Imagine instead long sweeps of an elegant scythe cutting your grass and pesky weeds in blissful, meditative silence. That is the power of the "scythe revolution" sweeping North America. Written by a master of the scythe, professionally trained in Austria, and drawing deeply on research into original German texts, The Scything Handbook brings centuries-old scything techniques into the twent-first century. Detailed illustrations cover scythe assembly, perfecting the stroke, blade selection, honing, peening, and aftercare, as well as background on how scythes are forged. Also covered are the basics of making hay and mulch by hand, and how to grow and harvest gains at the home and homestead scale for self-sufficiency. Scything promotes health, flexibility, mind-body connection, and a meditative contemplation of the natural world while producing beautiful lawns and luscious mulch for the modern gardener and homesteader. This is truly an heirloom tool to master. Join the scythe revolution! Ian Miller followed a career in music with a degree in Agroecology from UC Santa Cruz. During a two year stint on a biodynamic farm in Austria he learned how to scythe and delved into historic scything texts in German. He has worked for Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa and is developing a twemty-acre scythe-based homestead near Decorah, Iowa, where he grows his own grain for bread making and makes hay by hand.
Smith and Hawken: the Tool Book
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The Garden Writers Association of America declared it best book of the year for 1998. And The New York Times wrote: "Logan, who is one of our best garden writers, has produced not only a real book but a scrupulously researched, handsomely designed, and highly enjoyable one to book."The Took Book celebrates garden tools in all their pleasure, practicality, variety, beauty, ingenuity, simplicity, and purity. Thirteen chapters and over 70 striking full-color photographic spreads-obsessive and obsessively informative-present hundreds of tools organized by task: 22 shovels, 21 spades, 12 trowels, 16 hoes, 11 weeders, 19 hand pruners, 10 pruning saws. In addition to garden tool necessities, here are knives, axes, hooks, watering cans, rakes, riddles, brooms, wheel barrows, shears, and scoops, and much more. There are tools to start the garden from seed in the spring, tools to keep it growing and healthy all summer, and tools clean up in the fall. And, finally, tools to care for the tools. In addition, the the book presents a detailed overview of the marriage of tool to type of work-how garden tools evolved, how to use each type of tool properly, and what to look for in a tool. It's the right tool for the right job. 37,000 copies in print.
Tools of the Earth: the practice and pleasure of gardening
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Reveals the intricacies of garden tools from the inevitable shovel to the obligatory garden hat.
