Vegetable Gardening for Beginners: A Simple Guide to Growing Vegetables at Home

I used this like a bible this year (as a beginner) Concise and has all the key points I needed. So far so good!

I bought this book for my husband who recently got into gardening when we bought our new house. He has 2 above ground garden boxes and wants to learn more about how to grow different things in our region so I bought him this book. He absolutely loves it because it provides basic information in a clear and concise format that's easy to follow. He keeps this book on his nightstand and reads it often.

Excellent starter Veg garden book. Worth the purchase, lots of good ideas to get you started.

Loved this book. Great to start gardening.

I picked up some pointers in this book.I guess I'm not exactly a beginner at this point since I've been taking care of someone else's established garden for about 9 years.So I have found out about some of this stuff over those years by talking to other people and on the internet.Some of the information in this book doesn't apply for me since I don't start plants indoors and I don't used raised beds. So I didn't read all the pages in this book.However we do usually get tomatoes that were started by somebody else in a greenhouse or maybe some from places like Home Depot.Some things I've learned and can recommend are:Get your soil tested by Cooperative Extension or someplace like that. With fertilizers more is not always better. My cucumber plants keep giving me a lot of foliage and flowers but not very many cucumbers. There's too much organic material (manure) in my soil and the pH level of the soil is 7.6 which is too alkaline. My soil report says all it needs is small amounts of nitrogen fertilizer right now and only at the beginning of the season.I have saved myself many hours of backbreaking work by covering the empty rows between the plants with a weed barrier fabric. These fabrics allow air and water to get into the soil but it blocks the sunlight to kill the weeds. This book mentions using mulch for the same purpose which I may do for the spaces between the individual tomato plants.Most cucumber varieties are designed by Nature to climb like a vine. I built some simple circular cages that I place around my cucumber mounds. I use the thin fencing wire with the square openings in it. I tie them into a circle with zip ties. You can make four cuts into the wire where four of the squares intersect. Remove the cross shaped cutout and bend the cut wires back to create a place to reach your hand into the cage. Wear gloves and safety glasses when working with this type or wire. The cut off ends of the wire are sharp and they can swing back and hit someone in the eye. Cut off or bend back the cut off wires at both ends of the cage also.Books like this talk about organic gardening methods which can apparently take a few years to work well. I use the deadly SEVIN pesticide when my plants first start growing and I even spray the SEVIN into the soil within the rows. But then I switch over to organic pesticides when the plants start getting flowers so as not to harm the bees.I may switch over to soaker hoses this year for watering. Soaker hoses don't get the leaves of the plants wet. Wet leaves can cause fungal diseases like powdery mildew on cucumbers and zucchini.There are traps that come with bait that are specifically designed to catch Japanese beetles which appear in large numbers at certain times of the year.Here's a bee safe product to kill the dreaded squash borer moth which destroys zucchini plants:Safer Brand 5163 Caterpillar Killer II Concentrate, 16 Oz

As the title says, this book is a very useful and practical (yet short and easy to follow!) guide to starting, maintaining, and harvesting your garden. I'm surprised how much the author was able to pack into this book to make it as comprehensive as possible, and yet it reads some quickly and is thankfully so easy to follow.The second part of the book gives very specific instructions to follow for many of the most popular vegetables one might plant in their garden. Very, very well-written book

This is probably one of the best books I could have bought to help me become a more knowledgeable gardener. Every page is chock full of important information about plants, soil, types of gardens, and other useful information. The entire book is organized in a way that makes it easy to find what you are looking for -- and there is an index at the book, too. There are pictures throughout as well. I highly recommend this to anyone who is new to gardening, or even an intermediate gardener.

This might be a great book if you live in growing Zones 4-6, not in Zone 8b. I am a semi-beginer and it is still lacking a lot of information for begining gardeners. I wanted to have a hard copy of knowledge so I was not constantly relying on the wildly varying information on the internet; this would not be it. Just don't buy unless you live in growing zones 4-6 and don't use the awful map in this book to determine your zone.