Gardening By The Book

My husband and I are two extremely bookish people and much of what we have learned to do in life we first learned out of books, vegetable gardening being no exception. I never saw a vegetable garden close up and personal until I was a teenager and that was my grandfather's huge garden in Germany. And while I did help him in the weeding and harvesting, I never asked him much about how he went about the actual planting part! A few years later, when my parents moved to the state of Illinois, my mother decided to grow veggies since it was what all the neighbors did. Her garden produced beautifully with almost no effort it seemed to me, except to plant and weed. The soil was that perfect midwestern topsoil that needs practically no amendment at all and I don't remember a lot of pests. Of course, as a teen I'm sure I had blinders on much of the time!
When D and I married we wanted to be self-sufficient and grow our own food, so we bought our first gardening books and started what has become a pretty large collection.

There are some really good and helpful books there and there are some clunkers, some are somewhat outdated and some are newly naive but on the whole, most have yielded at least a nugget or two of very good information and I have learned so much from them!
Here is my favorite go-to book of all:

No matter how many garden books I read I always find Ed Smith's book to be the best. He writes with enthusiasm and knowledge, the photos that illustrate the book are terrific and it doesn't hurt for me that his experience is in the northeast where I also garden. His is a great reference work! I also tend to go to Burpee's The Complete Vegetable and Herb Gardener for reference. One of my favorite things about that book is the historical background given for each vegetable. I love learning about the provenance of what I grow and eat! It is really fun to see how the years have changed our perceptions about certain plants.

The oldies but goodies:

My very first garden book was Thalassa Cruso's book based on her old public television show. It came out in the 1970s and at the time I just loved it, but it was soon eclipsed by my very favorite from that era, Crockett's Victory Garden. I loved watching Jim Crockett on TV and found his book to be a wonderful guide to growing. I especially liked that it followed the gardening year month by month, keeping me on track with my garden chores. Later in the decade Dick Raymond came along with his over-the-top enthusiasm (and salesmanship for rototillers!) I didn't read his books back then, but I ordered some old copies last year. All of these authors had solid advice on gardening, but they were popular before organic gardening really went mainstream, so not all the info works for me today. Still, it is fun to read through them from time to time to get that basic knowledge.

Enter the Rodale era! Shortly after we began gardening we discovered Organic Gardening and Farming magazine and soon began to order Rodale press's books about growing the organic way. This changed everything! Gone were the chemical fertilizers and in came the compost! Those old Rodale books are still great resources for today's garden. They are not glamorous, but there is much to be learned in them.

Three years ago I discovered Eliot Coleman and his fall/winter gardening techniques. His ideas were the newest to change my thinking about the gardening season and although I have not yet tried many of his methods, I have certainly learned to extend my season beyond what I ever would have back in the 70s. The Year Round Vegetable Gardener by Nikki Jabour is also a very nice book that gives insight into extending the season for those who live in the north.

Vegetable Gardening the Colonial Williamsburg Way by Wesley Greene is a gorgeous book that has nice simple ideas from an era when "organic" was the only way to garden and one used what nature made available to you. Like my Burpee book it also gives a lot of history of the vegetables used in Williamsburg in the colonial era. John Jeavons' classic book How to Grow More Vegetables is an update from the 70's, and unfortunately I found it as dry as bones and difficult to read. The Idiot's Guide is pretty basic as one might imagine, but not bad at all for the price. And Small Plot, High Yield Gardening by Sal Gilbertie and Larry Sheehan is very useful to me because they garden in my own state and so address many of the conditions and sowing dates that I deal with.
Not included in this post are the clunkers, and believe me, I have a few of them in the collection. Some are expensive clunkers at that, like one book which looked good on the Amazon write up that ended up being little more than a collection of info you can find on the back of any decent seed packet.
These are the books I'll be leafing through along with the seed catalogues in the coming cold months as I dream of and start the seeds of next season's garden. I have to give them credit for forging me into a gardener. I also have to give credit to the many garden bloggers out there who have added to my store of knowledge and shared their tips, successes and failures. Gardeners are a generous group! Do you have any favorite garden books that you refer to again and again?