The best books about vegetables 📚

Joy Larkcom knows her vegetables, and how to grow them, like no other. She is a Brit, now living in Ireland, with deep experience. Her knowledge and wisdom applies to interested readers on both sides of the pond. 

Grow your own Vegetables is the best how-to book on vegetable gardening bar none. I recommend it to beginning, intermediate, as well as advanced growers. As for myself, I do well to thumb through its pages on occasion for best practices and refresher courses – especially when it comes to, say, spacing requirements for cultivating some of the unfamiliar vegetable crops.… show more.

To stop polluting our natural world with killer chemicals, gardeners have to know the good bugs from the bad, and how to effectively deal with the latter without harming the former. That’s where this book steps up with the latest effective information. It reveals the fascinating scope of which denizens are living among your plants and discusses assorted methods to encourage more of nature’s allies, who will, in turn, help eliminate the foes, and create a vital and sustainable balance. 

Unlike my other recommendations, Joy’s book lacks photos and includes only line drawings. Regardless, her book is a classic reference that was my go-to guide when I started growing vegetables back in the mid-1980s – before the pages eventually started falling out. This revised edition is full of detailed information on how to grow an extensive list of vegetables, along with everything else you need to know about the process of growing. While many other books may look prettier, there’s little that you might want to know about organic gardening that you won’t find within these pages. Buy a copy… show more.

A young girl wishes her family’s garden looked as pretty as their neighbors’ gardens—bursting with flowers and fragrance rather than the “ugly vegetables” her mom insists on growing. Her mom assures her their garden is worth waiting for, and that these vegetables will be better than flowers. At harvest time, she makes a soup that brings the neighborhood together. Based on events from author/illustrator Grace Lin’s own childhood, The Ugly Vegetables is a story about how food rooted in culture can pass history and identity down through generations, and the importance of growing food that tastes like home.