Gardening Planning – 7 eBooks

  

1. Black & Decker – The Complete Guide to Northeast Gardening: Techniques for Growing Landscape & Garden Plants (39 MB) :

This book offers a didactic, practical approach that allows novice-to intermediate residential gardeners to experience success with their vegetable, fruit, and ornamental gardens. This is not an attempt at a comprehensive “Bible” of gardening information, but a complete but focused treatment of plant species and simple, time-saving techniques that maximize the homeowners likelihood of succeeding with his or her garden.

2. Container Gardening for All Seasons: Enjoy Year-Round Color with 101 Designs (35 MB) :

More than a collection of inspiring container gardening photographs, Container Gardening for All Seasons provides a shopping list of materials and a helpful planting diagram for each of the more than 100 container options. Designed like a recipe book, the book offers even the most novice gardeners a no-fail, easy-to-follow instruction format for each container. Gardeners can choose the recipes by season that fit the sun and shade conditions of their landscape. Author Barbara Wise includes all you need to know to plan, plant, grow and maintain a container garden. Fabulous colorful fall and winter container choices are also included.

3. High-Impact, Low-Carbon Gardening: 1001 Ways Garden Sustainably (22 MB):

The environmental benefits of gardens are well-known: trees and plants capture carbon emissions, help to moderate the urban climate, promote health and well being, and help reduce energy consumption. But some garden practices are downright damaging, like using leaf blowers and other power tools, installing impermeable paving, and choosing plants that require excessive water or artificial fertilizers.

High-Impact, Low-Carbon Gardening is a one-stop reference for making a garden more green. From simple actions like composting household waste, installing a water barrel, or eliminating pesticides to more long-term investments like choosing permeable, locally sourced paving, and planting the most water-wise plants, there are hundreds of large and small choices home gardeners can make to reduce the environmental impact of designing, planting, and tending a garden.

4. Small-Space Container Gardens: Transform Your Balcony, Porch, or Patio with Fruits, Flowers, Foliage, and Herbs (25 MB) :

This exciting guide layers practical gardening fundamentals with creative solutions that encourage thinking outside the pot. Maybe this means re-purposing a shipping pallet to create a colorful vertical garden of nasturtiums and lobelia. Or simply seeing walls, rafters, railings, and everything in-between as fair game. It’s in these containers–traditional or not–that you’ll cultivate your own food, attract beneficial insects, grow flowering vine privacy screens, and so much more. You’ll also learn how to tackle unique challenges, like windy conditions when gardening several stories above street level, and how to care for plants and troubleshoot with the best of them.

5. The Intelligent Gardener: Growing Nutrient Dense Food (4 MB) :

Vegetables, fruits, and grains are a major source of vital nutrients, but centuries of intensive agriculture have depleted our soils to historic lows. As a result, the broccoli you consume today may have less than half of the vitamins and minerals that the equivalent serving would have contained a hundred years ago. This is a matter for serious concern, since poor nutrition has been linked to myriad health problems including cancer, heart disease, obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes. For optimum health we must increase the nutrient density of our foods to the levels enjoyed by previous generations.

(217.8 MB)