Small-Plot, High-Yield Gardening: How to Grow Like a Pro, Save Money, and Eat Well by Turning Your Back Yard Into An Organic Produce Garden
- ISBN13: 9781580080378
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Are you tired of throwing away time, energy, and money on a perfectly manicured, water-guzzling, weed-producing lawn? Are you longing to feed your family in more healthful and eco-friendly ways but shocked by organic produce prices at the grocery store? Do you fantasize about growing your own food but hesitate to take on more than you can manage?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, it’s time for you to get down and dirty—and take the plunge that will please your taste buds and your pocket-book! In Small-Plot, High-Yield Gardening, Sal Gilbertie and Larry Sheehan will help you turn your sprawling suburban acreage or postage stamp–sized plot into a low-impact, all-organic, totally sustainable produce garden.
You’ll learn about the most effective natural fertilizers, drought-resistant cultivation methods, pest-repellent companion plantings, trends in heirloom herb and vegetable varieties, and raised-bed techniques… More >>
The most impressive thing about this book, initially, is the array of garden plans for different garden sizes. Sal presents plans for a 750, 1500 and 3000 square foot gardens, drawn to scale with succession plantings dates for mid-summer and fall crops. Additonally, there are plans for a 400 square foot salad or soup garden, a late or winter garden and plans for a 5-stage supply garden.
If that’s not enough, Sal also sets out, in easy to follow, step-by-step detail the calendar of work for the gardening year, based on average date of last frost in Spring and first frost date in Winter. He provides detailed steps on how to start transplants from seed and how to fight the most common causes of transplant failure.
There is also a fascinating discussion of how to tell the gender of your squash plant flowers (fried squash flowers, anyone?).
I truly cannot recommend this book too highly for the beginning to early intemediate gardener who’s trying to make sense of when to do which tasks in the garden.
It is a pretty good book for basics. It explains sun, soil, feeding, planning, watering well from the standpoint of a gardener in Connecticut. The tone is a little harsh sometimes. He makes me feel guilty my garden does not get enough sun to get over 100 tomatoes off each plant, but hey, I can’t knock down my neighbors’ fence and trees and my wife won’t let me cut down the big sycamore.
The suggested schedules would not be very useful for somebody in a different climate. There are a few crazy typos in there, like recommendation for two 100-foot trenches for asparagus for a family of four. I am pretty sure he meant two 10-foot trenches. On balance the advice is very worthwhile and I would recommend it for a beginners bookshelf.
This book is very comprehensive and has a great deal of good detail for small-plot gardening. Lots of good tips that are easy to follow. I can seen that it will be a good reference book for me. I ordered this book after seeing the author on Martha Stewart one morning. It was a good investment.
I wasn’t expecting it to be as interesting as it is. I read the whole thing in one sitting! If you’re planning your first garden and don’t want to overdo it, the garden plans may not help you much (the smallest is 10′ X 10′) but they’ll give you some ideas of how to arrange things and what you can do when you’re ready to expand. The details are great, especially for me since I’m about to start my first garden this year. I do wish he had a bigger variety of suggestions for fertilizer, but he’s a really big fan of rabbit pellets and doesn’t really discuss much else. Overall, it’s going to be a huge help for me not only this first season, but for years to come.
This is the first gardening book that I’ve found so enticing on a Sunday that I read it – before the New York Times. And, that’s a good thing. I tend to wait until too late into the year to plan my garden and start my preparations. Not this year, not with this book! I’ve already highlighted major sections and transferred a lot of notes onto the seed packets that I purchased (when to plant them inside, when to plant them outside, where to put them in the garden …). It’s well written, it’s opinionated and if anything in my garden this year turns out as good looking as what I see at Gilbertie’s Herb Garden in Westport, CT, I’ll be thrilled!