4 Great Gardening Books

An editor once asked me if I was interested in writing a book about gardening. I replied that I didn’t see the point, since everything there is to know about gardening had already been written in great gardening books. At the time I was 10 years into gardening in a temperate climate with little annual variation in the weather. After the first few learning years, gardening there offered little challenge.

I had a shock when I moved about 30 miles north and started a new garden at a higher elevation. I discovered I had to learn how to garden all over again. And then I moved three-quarters across the country to Tennessee. Here northern and southern weather systems are constantly duking it out, and gardening became a constant challenge.

So instead of writing a book about gardening (for which I was obviously unqualified) I hit the books to hone my own gardening skills. Here are three of the books I learned the most from:

Gardening When It Counts — Growing Food in Hard Times by Steve Solomon. I call Steve my Gardening Guru. He is the founder of Territorial Seed Company and taught Master Gardener and Urban Farm classes at the University of Oregon before retiring to Tasmania. So far I have read Steve’s book three times, and I learned something each time. Among the huge amount of valuable information, two items stand out: the diagrams of typical root systems for different vegetables (which are helpful for understanding how far apart to space individual plants), and Steve’s formulas for mixing Complete Organic Fertilizer.

The Resilient Gardener, Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times by Carol Deppe. The author is a plant breeder living in Oregon, where she develops new varieties of open source crops for organic growing conditions. Carol’s book is full of cooking tips as well as growing tips. From her book I learned such things as the right way to cook my favorite potatoes — Yukon gold — to make awesome potato salad, and which varieties of corn are best for eating fresh, parching, or grinding into cornmeal or flour.

The Seed Garden — The Art and Practice of Seed Saving is a group effort by Seed Savers Exchange. For those of us who harvest most of our groceries from our own gardens, food security means having seeds to plant. And the best way to ensure having seeds of our favorite vegetables is to save our own seeds. This book includes comprehensive species-by-species instructions for cultivating, collecting, and storing seeds from 75 common vegetables and grains.

Epic Tomatoes — How to Select & Grow the Best Varieties of All Time by Craig LeHoullier. Locally known as North Carolina Tomatoman, Craig is a self-described tomato nut, which is plain to see in this book. As the tomato advisor for Seed Savers Exchange, Craig has trialed more the 1,200 varieties of hybrid and non-hybrid tomatoes. He describes the best 250 in this book, which includes everything you need to know to grow, harvest, and save the seeds of luscious tomatoes growing in your garden.