Fall Gardening Time Is Just Around the Corner

Last Updated on Monday, 05 November 2012 11:28

Pioneer Library System - Monthly Picks

Maybe your summer garden has suffered from the heat and drought, but cooler days are ahead.  Be prepared to take advantage of the fall and winter growing seasons by checking out these books available from the Pioneer Library System.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Year-Round Gardening by Delilah Smittle and Sheri Ann Richerson

Enjoy and benefit from the garden all year long. Whether it's onions in the summer, lettuce in the winter, or orchids any time, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Year-Round Gardening covers every step of the process of both outdoor and indoor gardening. From seeds, soil, compost, equipment, and fertilizers to all types of covers and greenhouses, and even gardening and harvesting in root cellars during winter, this guide is a must-have for any dedicated gardener.

A Gardener's Guide to Frost: Outwit the Weather and Extend the Spring and Fall Seasons  
by Philip Harnden

In this book, all aspects of frost are explained to help gardeners start their planting earlier in the spring and extend their growing season later in the fall. You’ll learn what weather systems produce frost, how it damages or enhances the flavor of your plants, how to read your garden’s microclimate, and how to design your garden so you can work with frost, instead of against it. The informative text is paired with beautiful full-color photos of useful frost protection techniques and wonderful gardens in their full frosty splendor.

Homegrown Harvest: a Season-by-Season Guide to a Sustainable Kitchen Garden by Rita Pelczar, editor in chief

Written by the American Horticultural Society's foremost fruit, vegetable and herb experts, Homegrown Harvest provides lifestyle-changing advice that gardeners need for growing a year-round supply of healthy edible crops for their table. Specific local and regional advice enables gardeners to decide how and what to grow wherever they live in North America.

Container Gardening for All Seasons: Enjoy Year-Round Color with 101 Designs by Barbara Wise

More than a collection of inspiring container gardening photographs, Container Gardening for All Seasons provides a shopping list of materials and a helpful planting diagram for each of the more than 100 container options. Designed like a recipe book, the book offers even the most novice gardeners an easy-to-follow instruction format for each container. Gardeners can choose the recipes by season that fit the sun and shade conditions of their landscape. Author Barbara Wise includes all you need to know to plan, plant, grow and maintain a container garden. Fabulous colorful fall and winter container choices are also included.

The Year-Round Garden: How to Create a Beautiful and Practical Garden That Will Produce and Bloom No Matter What the Season by Geoff Stebbings

The Year-Round Garden is a unique, easy-to-use gardening book that shows readers how to combine plants to create a stunning year-round effect. While other gardening books often focus on planting for different seasons, this book suggests practical plant combinations that work across seasons, the result being a garden that adapts for the better with every passing season. The opening section is broken down into seasons, with profiles of the most appropriate plants for each time of year. Every plant will have a brief description and a list of companion plants that will either complement the featured plant during its main period of interest, or will prolong the interest for several seasons. The middle section shows plant schemes in action, using sequential photography from specially planted gardens to demonstrate how mixing the profiled plants together really does extend the garden's vitality beyond seasonal ups and downs.

The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener: How to Grow Your Own Food 365 Days a Year No Matter Where You Live by Niki Jabbour

This illustrated gardening guide provides detailed instructions for developing season extending garden practices that can provide fresh produce throughout the entire year, even in climates that experience cold winters. The work begins with an outline of techniques, infrastructure, and practices that can extend the growing season, and continues with an in-depth discussion of specific plant types and varieties suited to year round gardening. The volume includes appendices detailing cold frame designs and providing charts for succession planting and interplanting.

The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year-Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses by Eliot Coleman
This new book focuses on growing produce of unparalleled freshness and quality in customized unheated or, in some cases, minimally heated, movable plastic greenhouses. Coleman offers clear, concise details on greenhouse construction and maintenance, planting schedules, crop management, harvesting practices, and even marketing methods in this complete, meticulous, and illustrated guide. Readers have access to all the techniques that have proven to produce higher-quality crops on Coleman’s own farm. His painstaking research and experimentation with more than 30 different crops will be valuable to small farmers, homesteaders, and experienced home gardeners who seek to expand their production seasons.

Fresh Food From Small Spaces: the Square-Inch Gardener's Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting by R.J. Ruppenthal.

Readers will learn how to transform their balconies and windowsills into productive vegetable gardens, their countertops and storage lockers into commercial-quality sprout and mushroom farms, and their outside nooks and crannies into whatever they can imagine, including sustainable nurseries for honeybees and chickens. Free space for the city gardener might be no more than a cramped patio, balcony, rooftop, windowsill, hanging rafter, dark cabinet, garage, or storage area, but no space is too small or too dark to raise food.