Here are 93 books that Harvest fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a New Englander, born and bred. I am a 5th-generation chicken keeper and lifelong gardener. An author and Maine Master Gardener, I live on a small farm in Maine where I raise chickens, ducks, and geese and grow all kinds of vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers. My mom was a 3rd-grade teacher and my dad was incredibly artistic, so that combination resulted in me being an avid DIYer. I love to build and make and paint and raise and grow all kinds of things.
The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener is an invaluable gardening resource, especially for those of us who live in the northern climates. Nova Scotia-based author Niki Jabbour proves firsthand that it is possible to grow all kinds of vegetables in even the coldest of areas. Her cold frames from which she plucks handfuls of carrots and leafy greens when they’re buried in snow are reason enough to buy this book.
In "The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener", Nova Scotia-based gardener and writer Niki Jabbour shares her secrets for growing food during every month of the year. Her season-defying techniques, developed in her own home garden where short summers and low levels of winter sunlight create the ultimate challenge, are doable, affordable, and rewarding for gardeners in any location where frost has traditionally ended the growing season. Jabbour explains how to make every month a vegetable-gardening month. She provides in-depth instruction for all of her time-tested techniques, including selecting the best varieties for each season, mastering the art of succession planting, and maximizing…
I am a New Englander, born and bred. I am a 5th-generation chicken keeper and lifelong gardener. An author and Maine Master Gardener, I live on a small farm in Maine where I raise chickens, ducks, and geese and grow all kinds of vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers. My mom was a 3rd-grade teacher and my dad was incredibly artistic, so that combination resulted in me being an avid DIYer. I love to build and make and paint and raise and grow all kinds of things.
This former DIY Network writer has hit a home run with her latest book which is packed with all kinds of ideas for herbs, all beautifully photographed. From sachets and salves to herbal cleaning vinegars and smudge sticks, the author shares all kinds of projects. There are even edibles including herb butter and herbal teas. This one is not to be missed.
Capture the beauty, fragrance, and power of herbs in these delightful crafts for home and garden.
Why craft with herbs? They're easy to grow, beautiful, fragrant, full of health benefits, and are incredibly versatile! Herbs are best known for their medicinal and culinary uses, but there's so much more you can do with them. From spray disinfectants to wreaths and garlands, custom herb salts to homemade skincare products, there's something here for every room of your house-and everyone on your gift list! Learn how to make beautiful and useful items such as:
Smudge Sticks
Herb Sachets
Hanging Herbal Swag
Natural…
As a farmer and a writer, I have devoted my career to organic vegetable and flower production. I founded Growing for Market, a national magazine for market farmers, and published a monthly column about cut flowers. I also grew flowers commercially for 25 years for florists, supermarkets, CSAs, and farmer's markets. I am obsessed with all things in the garden, but especially with the flowering plants, and I’m delighted to share my love of flowers with anyone who wants to learn more.
Erin Benzakein stormed the gardening world a decade ago with an ambitious social media presence featuring gorgeous images and valuable information about her flower business in Washington State. This, her first book, pulls together her best tips about growing and arranging flowers in the new natural style. It’s lavishly illustrated with dreamy photos — backlit flower fields, individual stems laid on a rustic workbench, exuberant arrangements. In all, an inspiring and useful book. Erin has followed up with two more books, equally wonderful.
The Cut Flower Garden: Erin Benzakein is a florist-farmer, leader in the locaflor farm-to-centerpiece movement, and owner of internationally renowned Floret Flower Farm in Washington's lush Skagit Valley.
A stunning flower book: This beautiful gardening book and guide to growing, harvesting, and arranging gorgeous blooms year-round provides readers with vital tools to nurture a stunning flower garden and use their blossoms and cut flowers to create show-stopping arrangements. It makes a beautiful gift for any occasion, for friends, loved ones and gardening lovers alike!
Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden: Cut Flower Garden is equal parts instruction and inspiration-a flower gardening…
I am a New Englander, born and bred. I am a 5th-generation chicken keeper and lifelong gardener. An author and Maine Master Gardener, I live on a small farm in Maine where I raise chickens, ducks, and geese and grow all kinds of vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers. My mom was a 3rd-grade teacher and my dad was incredibly artistic, so that combination resulted in me being an avid DIYer. I love to build and make and paint and raise and grow all kinds of things.
The ultimate DIY gardening book, author Shawna Coronado shares more than 100 quick and easy, practical and functional projects for the garden to save you time and money. From tips for a more bountiful harvest to mixing your own garden soil, repelling garden pests, or making a more attractive garden border, the author walks the readers through each project with simple step-by-step instructions.
Shawna Coronado, one of America’s most creative gardeners, gives you her library of clever gardening tricks in 101 Organic Gardening Hacks.
If you ask garden author Shawna Coronado what a hack is, she might just wave her hand toward her own back yard. She could be pointing at the garden bench she created from leftover wood posts and a few cinder blocks, or the rows of wine bottles buried soldier-style along a winding pathway, or even the garden soil itself, which is blended by hand from an organic soil recipe she devised.
If I'm honest, I became a gardener because I like getting dirty. Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Tom Kitten is the story of my childhood (and my adulthood too, only now I don't have to pretend I'm going to stay clean). Of course, high-quality soil leads to high-quality produce, and I deeply adore the flavors of strawberries growing in deep, dark soil. Biting into a juicy, homegrown tomato still warm from the summer sun is bliss.
First, let me explain where I'm coming from – my husband and I spent over a decade growing nearly all of our own vegetables and a considerable portion of our other sustenance on our homestead. So even though our current smaller plot only feeds us a side dish or three per day, I tend to think of gardening as something that should be good for our wallets as well as our bellies and the earth. Gardening When It Counts is all that and is 100% based on the author's personal experience growing most of his own food. Highly recommended.
The decline of cheap oil is inspiring increasing numbers of North Americans to achieve some measure of backyard food self-sufficiency. In hard times, the family can be greatly helped by growing a highly productive food garden, requiring little cash outlay or watering. Currently popular intensive vegetable gardening methods are largely inappropriate to this new circumstance. Crowded raised beds require high inputs of water, fertility and organic matter, and demand large amounts of human time and effort. But, except for labor, these inputs depend on the price of oil. Prior to the 1970s, North American home food growing used more land…
William Alexander’s best-selling gardening memoir, The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for a Perfect Garden has been praised for its fresh, humorous, and honest take on home gardening. The books he’s selected similarly break the mould for garden books, featuring rabid rose gardeners, an obsessive breeder, and a Czech playwright.
Gardening, whether in a backyard or a hundred-acre orchard, is an audacious attempt to improve on nature, and Smith’s fascinating hybrid of biography, history, and botany brings to life the most audacious of them all. The only biography on my list, I’ve included it because, in an age where we might be forgiven for thinking it takes millions of corporate dollars and genetic engineers to produce a new plant, The Garden of Invention reminds us how one man’s singular determination, patience, and brilliance can change the world. And produce the perfect potato for McDonald’s French fries.
The wide-ranging and delightful history of celebrated plant breeder Luther Burbank and the business of farm and garden in early twentieth- century America
At no other time in history has there been more curiosity or concern about the food we eat-and genetically modified foods, in particular, have become both pervasive and suspect. A century ago, however, Luther Burbank's blight-resistant potatoes, white blackberries, and plumcots-a plum-apricot hybrid-were celebrated as triumphs in the best tradition of American ingenuity and perseverance. In his experimental grounds in Santa Rosa, California, Burbank bred and cross-bred edible and ornamental plants-for both home gardens and commercial farms-until…
I’m a writer, artist, and historian, and I’ve spent much of my career trying to blow up the powerful American definition of environment as a non-human world “out there”, and to ask how it’s allowed environmentalists, Exxon, and the EPA alike to refuse to take responsibility for how we inhabit environments. Along the way, I’ve written Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America and "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA"; co-founded the LA Urban Rangers public art collective; and co-created the “Our Malibu Beaches” phone app. I currently live in St. Louis, where I’m a Research Fellow at the Sam Fox School at Washington University-St. Louis.
A self-critical and often hysterically funny account of what happens when you plant a garden to be “one with nature” and nature has other ideas. Still my favorite Pollan book (his first!), which is saying a lot. Favorite bit: his journey from “living in harmony” with a resident groundhog to an albeit ill-considered act of firebombing.
Following a herbal and homeopathic pathway for 20 years has taken me on many insightful and inspiring tangents. One of those being the passion to commune with nature spirits and learn directly from herbs. This practice has led me on many a fine adventure (one of which Wild Flower Walker contains) and continues to be a rich source of teachings and growth. I have been teaching these practices for the last 11 years and offer courses in Shamanic Herbalism; Herbal Alchemy; & Plant Spirit Communication. These books have been treasures and catalysts for me and I hope they will open your heart further to the rich world of nature spirits.
Any reading on nature spirits has to include a book or two from the Findhorn community or Dorothy Maclean - one of its founders and plant spirit communicator. I recommend this one as it contains not only insights from many plant devas and landscape devas, but a broad overview of the formation of the Findhorn Community itself - which occurred in direct communication and cocreation with the plant devas themselves. A fascinating and eye-opening read.
My husband sums up my biography as “I am, therefore I dig.” I live, garden, read and write in Chatham, New Jersey, and have had a long, open love affair with the gardening style “across the pond.” At the New York Botanical Garden I teach English garden history, and I’m a regular contributor to the British gardening journal, Hortus. In my writing, I follow the relationship between the pen and the trowel, that is authors and their gardens. I’ve written books about children’s authors Beatrix Potter and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and, as you might imagine, the research trips to the UK were a special bonus.
To understand the British love of gardening, I put Jenny Uglow’s chatty book top of the list. Reading her prose is like listening to a favorite teacher, one who tells a good story while slipping in the pertinent facts. "If I were a crow, flying across Britain in the 10th century,” she writes, “I would see forest and fields, iron forges and salt pans, small towns and settlements - occasionally I could circle over a deep park, or swoop down and feed on an orchard of ripe fruit, or pull worms from the newly turned earth in a small allotment." She takes us from Roman villas and monastery herbers to palace gardens, Sissinghurst’s herbaceous borders, and the futuristic Eden Project. She loves her subject, and so will you.
Did the Romans have rakes? Did the monks get muddy? Did the potato seem really, really weird when it arrived on our shores?
This lively 'potted' history of gardening in Britain takes us on a garden tour from the thorn hedges around prehistoric settlements to the rage for decking and ornamental grasses today. It tracks down the ordinary folk who worked the earth - the apprentice boys and weeding women, the florists and nursery gardeners - as well as aristocrats and grand designers and famous plant-hunters. Coloured by Jenny Uglow's own love for plants, and brought to life in the…
My husband sums up my biography as “I am, therefore I dig.” I live, garden, read and write in Chatham, New Jersey, and have had a long, open love affair with the gardening style “across the pond.” At the New York Botanical Garden I teach English garden history, and I’m a regular contributor to the British gardening journal, Hortus. In my writing, I follow the relationship between the pen and the trowel, that is authors and their gardens. I’ve written books about children’s authors Beatrix Potter and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and, as you might imagine, the research trips to the UK were a special bonus.
If you love flowers and love to garden, do not miss this book by British poet James Fenton. Grab your seed catalogs and make a list of the hundred flowers you would grow, then compare your choices to James Fenton’s. I found it the perfect book to read during those gray days of winter, his bright prose radiating like an injection of sunshine. Fenton romps through the world of flower color: the orange of nasturtiums and Mexican sunflower, the lemon yellow evening primroses, and California bluebells “the colour of blue poster paint.” He captures his century of blooms with a poet’s pen. I didn’t want it to end.
"An engaging mix of the serious and the playful, and Fenton writes with a lightness of touch perfectly suited to the subject." --Alexander Urquhart, The Times Literary Supplement
Forget structure. Forget trees, shrubs, and perennials. As James Fenton writes, "This is not a book about huge projects. It is about thinking your way toward the essential flower garden, by the most traditional of routes: planting some seeds and seeing how they grow."
In this light hearted, instructive, original "game of lists," Fenton selects one hundred plants he would choose to grow from seed. Flowers for color, size, and exotic interest;…
