Complete Guide to Vegetables, Fruits & Herbs

by Walter L. Doty and Ron Hildebrand

Sources: 1) National Gardening Survey, 2002 This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 089721501X
• ISBN13: 9780897215015
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Meredith Corporation
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 8.1" x 10.8"

Customer Reviews

Advice for veggie growers

This book is great. Ortho really does a great job on their gardening books. Lots of advice for growing vegetables in Summer, Spring and Fall. Full of information from prepping the garden and soil to harvesting. Information also on growing herbs. Very easy to understand. It also has lots of illustrations for those of us who like visuals.

All the basics in one place

If I had to recommend only one general guide to vegetable and edible gardening, this would be it. In addition to information on vegetables, this 224 page guide includes sections on planning your garden; herbs; fruits, berries & nuts; and dealing with pests & diseases. In additon to a fairly standard encyclopedia of vegetables, I especially found the guide to pruning fruit trees, brambles (blackberries, raspberries, etc.), and grapes superior to any descriptions I've found elsewhere. The instructions are easy to read with useful diagrams that actually make sense. I've used the pruning advice to greatly increase my raspberry and grape harvest - much to the envy of my neighbors!

A good basic, no-nonsense kitchen gardening book

If the focus of your garden is vegetables or fruit, you need this book. Concise but informative, this book combines and updates three or four older books (some of which were hard to find in their original editions) by the same publisher into one handy, easily browsed book of techniques and varieties. The end result is a reference suitable for both beginners and experienced gardeners. The book has four main sections: vegetables, herbs, temperate fruits, and tropical fruits. All sections are very well illustrated with mouth-watering photographs, and the techniques mentioned are illustrated decently well where they aren't well-described. A long list of seed producers is available in the back of the book, including URLs, and there's a whole chapter on seasons and how to take advantage of them. The tropical fruit section is particularly helpful for those in temperate zones who might wish to grow citrus or bananas. If the book has a weakness it's the lack of mention of alternative gardening techniques. While a guide to basic hydroponics would be above and beyond the call of duty and information on biodynamics would be simply ridiculous, there is no section on organic gardening. It may be that it would expand the scope of the book somewhat unacceptably, but that's still a serious omission for a gardening book published in 2004. It's not a dealkiller though. Overall, this is an excellent value for gardening books from a long-standing book series. If you can have only one book on vegetable gardening techniques, this is a strong contender.

Very complete and detailed

This helpful guide contains instructions for growing fruit and herbs as well as vegetables. It gives climate and soil requirements, and detailed growing instructions. It also discusses various species. This is the only vegetable gardening book I've come across that also includes extensive information on growing fruit, including all the major species that grow in the US, as well as semi-tropical species such as oranges for warmer climates. It even covers nut tress! The section on herbs is very large and complete. It even tells how to pollinate your own plants, when you have only a few. There are many excellent color pictures and illustrations. If you grow vegetables, fruit, or herbs, you need this book!