Seven Recently-Arrived Titles from the Gardening Section:

I Garden: Urban Style – T. Reginald Solomon & Michael Nolan

Helps gardeners learn the best plants to grow based on their style, schedule and available space. Offers instruction for many urban gardening options including window, herb, container and community gardens, plus shared spaces.

Kiss My Aster: A Graphic Guide to Creating a Fantastic Yard Totally Tailored to You – Amanda Thomsen & Am I Collective

Who cares what the neighbors think? Kiss My Aster is a hilarious, irreverent, interactive guide to designing an outdoor space that is exactly what you want. Combining entertaining illustrations with laugh-out-loud text, Amanda Thomsen lays out the many options for home landscaping and invites you to make the choices. Whether you want privacy hedges, elegant flower beds, a patio for partying, a food garden, a kids’ play space, a pond full of ducks, or all of the above, you’ll end up with a yard you’ll adore. Forget about doing it the ‘right’ way: Do it your way!

Urban Gardening for Dummies – National Gardening Association & Paul Simon

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.

• Covers square-foot gardening and vertical and layered gardening
• Includes guidance on working with container gardening, succession gardening, and companion gardening
• Offers guidance on pest management, irrigation and rain barrels, and small-space composting

If you’re interested in starting you’re an urban garden that makes maximum use of minimal space, Urban Gardening For Dummies has you covered.

The Speedy Vegetable Garden – Mark Diacono & Lia Leendertz

Typically, vegetable gardening is about the long view: peas sown in spring aren’t harvested until summer, and tomatoes started indoors in February can’t be eaten until July. But it’s not true for all plants. Some things can be planted and eaten in weeks, days, even hours.

The Speedy Vegetable Garden highlights more than 50 quick crops, with complete information on how to sow, grow, and harvest each plant, and sumptuous photography that provides inspiration and a visual guide for when to harvest. In addition to instructions for growing, it also provides recipes that highlight each crop’s unique flavor, like Chickpea sprout hummus, stuffed tempura zucchini flowers, and a paella featuring calendula.

Sprouted seeds are the fastest. Microgreens can be harvested in weeks: cilantro, 14 days after planting; arugula and fennel in 10 days. And a handful of vegetable varieties grow more quickly than their slower relatives, like dwarf French beans (60 days), cherry tomatoes (65 days), and early potatoes (75 days).

The Speedy Vegetable Garden puts fresh, seed-to-table food at your fingertips, fast!

Teeny Tiny Gardening – Emma Hardy

Teeny Tiny Gardening is horticulture on the smallest of scales. No matter how tiny your space – indoor or outdoor, garden, yard, balcony or even just a windowsill or tabletop – here you will find original, fun and inspiring ideas.

The 35 projects range from an elegant fern terrarium and a scented spring bulb basket to colourful woven bags and hessian sacks filled with cheerful summer blooms. There are edible gardens, including fruit bushes planted in catering-sized kitchen pans and a vertical garden of herbs grown on a wooden stepladder. You will find lots of ideas for using recycled and salvaged containers, such as a metal bathtub filled with vegetable plants, metal food tins used for an indoor garden of wildflowers and a stack of wooden drawers filled with trailing plants. And at the teeniest end of the scale, there are even miniature tabletop gardens created in eggshells and bottle tops!

Children can learn basic gardening skills, too, by following the step-by-step photos to make their own magical fairy garden or a mysterious dinosaur den. Whether you are looking for ideas for all-year foliage or for a summer display of flowers, wanting to grow your own veggies and herbs, or needing to revamp your balcony, Teeny Tiny Gardening will provide you with all the inspiration and practical knowledge you need.

Allotment Handbook – DK Publishing

Allotment Handbook has everything you need to leave the supermarket behind in favour of tastier and healthier home-grown fruit and veg. Avoid bland, pesticide-tainted produce flown in from the other side of the world and start growing your own with this reassuring guide, complete with a glossary of gardening terms and a picture gallery of common weeds.

Allotment Handbook takes you through 10 steps to preparing your plot and teaches you need to know techniques such as sowing, planting, feeding, mulching, watering and weeding. Armed with the basics, you’ll learn how to grow over 70 types of fruit and vegetable crops. You’ll also find easy projects such as making a simple compost bin and planting a fruit tree and tips to attract wildlife along with simple, delicious ways to enjoy your produce. A handy troubleshooting section covers identifying and dealing with weeds, pests, and diseases.

Whether you prefer to start small with a few herbs and veg staples or you are more ambitious and intend to feed your whole family all year round, Allotment Handbook will show you how.

The Rurbanite: Living in the Country without Leaving the City – Alex Mitchell

In cities around the world, we are redefining our sense of urban living. No longer satisfied with a grey, sterile metropolis, we want the best of both worlds – the energy and diversity of the city, but a stronger sense of harmony with nature too. The Rurbanite Handbook explains everything you need to know to achieve this, proving it isn’t necessary to move to the country to meet nature head on, including:

• turning your back garden into an urban homestead
• putting a green roof on your garden shed
• planting to encourage wildlife
• guerrilla gardening
• keeping bees, hens, quails, ducks
• learning to identity the wild flowers growing out of cracks in the pavement
• turning ex-industrial sites into vibrant community gardens

Tags: Ester, gardening, nature, new titles, This Just In

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2013 at 11:00 am and is filed under Ester, Nature, This Just In. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.