The Best Homegarden Book

The Best Homegarden Book for growing food at home!

A great educational book that has rave reviews!
The Book is called: Grow Vegetables: Gardens – Yards – Balconies – Roof Terraces
Right up our alley!
Check out the reviews below!
This review is from JRGC
This book is wonderful!!! This is my second year growing veggies and my first year with this book. I learned so much from this easy to read guide. The beginning general section taught me about crop rotation and sunlight and watering schedules.
The sections devoted to each type of vegetable are very informative and go into just enough detail to be really helpful bot no so much that it was over my head.
This is a great book for beginning veggie gardeners!!!
This Review is by Creative Soul “kksings”
Wow! What a great book! Large pictures on every page. Broken down in easy-to-find sections for each type of vegetable with brief, informative information (no latin names or scientific babble). This is for the beginner to expert with just the basics you need to grow veggies.
My main questions (that this book answered beautifully) was when a veggie is ready to harvest (describes perfectly) and also best planting/growing conditions for each plant. It also describes how to combat problems that can arise.
I HIGHLY recommend this book to everyone who is interested in growing vegetables in a small/large garden or small balcony or simply in pots. This book will be a reference book for me for years and years to come.
I have provide a link to acces this book on my Homepage below. You will be able to find this link about one third down.
If you really want to get serious and grow great food at home simply then check this out today!

The Permaculture Home Garden

The Permaculture Home Garden by Linda Woodrow is the book from which I stole the quote you saw on my home page.
It is the very first sentence of the book's first chapter:

"This is a book about saving the planet and living to be a hundred, while throwing very impressive dinner parties and organising other creatures to do most of the work. It is a book about a very different style of growing food."

Why would you want to grow food in a different style? Linda answers that question two paragraphs further down:

"If you follow conventional gardening systems, growing your own food is a very expensive hobby. It is a full time job, and not exactly an inspiring one..."

And later on she says:

"I don't mind physical work, but I hate drudgery. There are too many things to fit into life for anything as boring as weeding or driving a tractor back and forth, back and forth."

It was Linda who taught me to think this way: if any garden task is boring, repetitive, or otherwise not much fun, then there has to be a better way to do it, or a way to outsource the task to nature.
Do you want a beautifully landscaped, productive and organic garden, where growing food is easy and fun, rather than a full time job? A garden full of birds and butterflies, of lizards and blooms, full of food and sensory delights? If yes, then Linda's book is the answer to your prayers.
The Permaculture Home Garden focuses on growing vegetables, fruit and herbs on a garden scale, from tiny inner city backyard to market garden.
Linda has developed a gardening system, a permaculture design module, that can be scaled up or down to be used in any size garden. She gives you a recipe, and it contains both the instructions, and also the reasoning behind them.
If you are a beginner, follow the recipe exactly and it will turn out well. If you are more experienced, be inspired by it, adapt and substitute to your heart's content, and come up with your own personal recipe.
The flavour? Seductive and scrumptious!

"I also believe that the best flavours come from the most seductive garden. A garden has to be an art form to be really productive. It has to feed the eyes and ears and nose as well. It has to be a refuge, a place of reflection, creation and enchantment to produce peas that can be used to bribe children."
That late, tired dash through bedlam with a shopping trolley compares very badly with a stroll through a seductive garden, not least because you can leave your purse behind.

The Founding Gardeners

Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison. We know these men as the Founding Fathers, the guiding spirits of the revolution that liberated America through compelling rhetoric, weapons and the recognition of a mutual necessity. (America could not thrive as the plundered minion of an island kingdom; England could not afford to support a country that treated her as an indulgent parent, always last in line for repayment.)

Missing from this familiar picture, as Andrea Wulf points out in a wonderfully illuminating and readable book, is a sense of the role of the first four presidents as “landholders” – often on a considerable scale. (The autocratic term “landowners” was never used.)

Wulf’s title, while catchy, is a bit of a misnomer. Granted, the first presidents were enthusiastic about their gardens. Endeavouring to offer models for a newly independent land, they planted (thanks to slave labour) their English-style shrubberies with American species: hemlock, white pine, magnolias, dogwood.

They took pains to exploit these domestic spaces to make political points. Two striking examples offered by Wulf are President Madison’s decision to place an untypically appealing group of slave homes in full view of his houseguests, and President Washington’s snub to the English passion for urns and obelisks: a garden temple that doubled as a urinal.

Gardens – and soaring above them all, the terraced masterpiece created for Thomas Jefferson on the hillsides of Monticello – played a significant role in the lives of the presidents. Not for nothing had this band of enlightened home-grown aristocrats studied the classics; presidential references to Cincinnatus – a politician who had made a point of his preference for tilling the soil – were frequent.

Wulf’s book (titled to echo its splendid predecessor, The Brother Gardeners) could more frankly have been named “The Founding Farmers”.
Agriculture lay at the root of America’s struggle to become an independent country. The early presidents knew that and so did the hard-working men to whom they represented themselves as toilers in the fields of the New World. The image-making was deliberate and a bit dishonest. Jefferson, while presenting himself as “entirely a Farmer, Soul and Body”, was equally at ease playing the diplomat in Paris, or strolling through an English manicured park.
For the most part, however, the interest of the presidents in land cultivation was both sincere and intense. When Thomas Jefferson smuggled home handfuls of Italian rice (“as much as my coat and surtout pockets would hold”), he knowingly risked imprisonment.

The Smell Review

Et in Arcadia Ego is the title of Poussin’s 16th-century painting depicting shepherds reading an inscription on a tomb. They are reflective, yet robustly shepherding their flocks, crooks in hand, their heads crowned with foliage.

This sense of the pastoral as alive is captured in Adam Nicolson’s Smell of Summer Grass. The book is a pleasure to read for the beautiful writing, the beguiling habitat, the misbegotten animals and the satisfaction of observing order being born of chaos.

This is not new territory for Nicolson, who has written extensively about Perch Hill in Sussex, the tumbledown farm he and his wife, Sarah Raven, bought in 1994, having sold everything and borrowed from their families to pursue their dream.

The price of Arcadia? £432,000. Nicolson keeps us abreast of the housekeeping costs, from Roger the ram (suspiciously cheap at £100) to the sum the man from Orange offered to put a mast up (£20,000), adding a fascinating layer to the story and a reality check to anyone with rose-tinted spectacles.

This is a dusting down and polishing up of a book he wrote 12 years ago. It is Perch Hill with hindsight, and the result is a hymn to British small farms that will stand as a wonderful document both of the past and the shifting present.

Nicolson writes of a decade straddling the millennium, when everything changed for small farmers, from foot-and-mouth to the hunting ban, from building regulations to health and safety, and above all money.
Nicolson speaks both languages, coming as a journalist from the outside and moving into this dying world to pursue a life close to the land. He apologises for not being authentic, but he does not need to. The chronicler has his place.
And he’s funny. “If there were mental hospitals for farms, Perch Hill would have been sectioned in February,” he writes, describing a less than glorious period at the farm.
With excruciating honesty, he charts the journey he and Sarah make into the Sussex Weald, introducing her as “the woman for whom, a few months before, I have left my wife. That is a phrase which leaves me raw.” His subsequent mugging and breakdown and their search for somewhere to settle will strike a chord with many a mid-lifer.
Raven inhabits the book as a warrior queen, a Britannia with her home birth, her babies, and the determination that in just 15 years has made her one of the country’s most celebrated garden experts.
At one point Nicolson describes her “striding around like Patton in Normandy, buoyed up by change, by things happening”. But it becomes clear that her focus has been wonderful ballast to his vision.
Nicolson illuminates fields of vetch and buttercups, woodland, people and bluebells: “That incredible, glamorous, seductive haze of the bluebell’s blue, a nightclub sheen in low light, the sexiest colour in the English landscape.” But he is also sensible, not least of his own part in change.