Home Gardening at Its Best: Productive Ways to Grow Your Own Fresh Vegetables

by Sal Gilbertie

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0689107420
• ISBN13: 9780689107429
• Release Date: January 1977
• Publisher: Atheneum Books
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.

Customer Reviews

It's just what I was looking for

This book is just what I was looking for. It was written for people just like me-wanna be gardeners. Gardening is just my hobby but I want to get results for all my work. I enjoy working outdoors. I find it so relaxing. Knowing how to do it right gives me more confidence. Just love the book. Can't wait for Spring so I can start planting. Josephine

Gardening/Small Places

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.

Great source of information

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.

Just in time to help improve gardening success this year!

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!

An Essential Reference

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.