Don't Throw in the Trowel

At last, help for home food gardeners. The simple, month-by-month layout of Don't Throw in the Trowel will help gardeners grow a bounty of vegetables, fruits, and herbs. Grow luscious tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, melons, and more, and enjoy all the fresh produce (and give the surplus to family and friends) that your garden grows using these easy tips. Don't Throw in the Trowel: A Month-by-Month Vegetable Gardening Guide is a fun read for every locavore who wants to cart tomatoes out of the garden by the wagonful.

Even if you've never been a farmer or a gardener before, this vegetable gardening book covers everything you need to know to get started. Here you can find specific information about starting seeds, transplanting, mulching, organic fertilizers, dealing with pest and disease problems, compost, and of course, information about different vegetables and helpful advice on how to grow them. You can also find information about square foot gardening, beneficial insects (and insect pests), easy ways to keep weeds down, and ways to extent the growing season into the winter months using cold frames and floating row covers.

What's more, the methods used in this book are those to save time (and your poor back and joints). Gardening can hurt sometimes – as the author can attest after having been felled by a bad back during her horticulturing days. This book is full of ways to keep you from ending up the way she did. Many organic methods actually help make gardening easier. For instance, putting down a thick layer of mulch early in the year helps you keep weeds down, reduce watering, add organic matter to the soil, and keep the plants cool in the summer heat. Grow heirloom vegetables for a reliable, colorful crop – and you can keep using the seeds from these plants years after year.

Most of all, this book also leads you on a month-by-month tour of the vegetable garden, so you can keep up with what needs to be done this month – and look ahead so you can be ready for next month.

It's always good to grow your own vegetables, especially with concerns about how far grocery store produce is shipped, concerns about the environment, and concerns about the future. But there's also a new understanding of how good it is to get outside and work with plants, and how delicious those first sun-warmed tomatoes are, and how good a newly-picked strawberry tastes, and how astonished your toddler is when she pulls up her first carrot. There's nothing on earth that can beat that.