Gardening

Its a beautiful, amazing spring day here!  Here are ten recent nonfiction picks on gardening!

Designing with Succulents by Debra Lee Baldwin - Succulents offer dazzling possibilities and require very little maintenance to remain lush and alluring year-round. No one knows them better than the Queen of Succulents, Debra Lee Baldwin. This new, completely revised edition of her bestselling classic is a design compendium that is as practical as it is inspirational. Designing with Succulents shares design and cultivation basics, hundreds of succulent plant recommendations, and 50 companion plant profiles. Lavishly illustrated with 400 photographs, you’ll find everything you need to visualize, create, and nurture a thriving, water-smart succulent garden.

DIY Hydroponic Gardens: How to Design and Build an Inexpensive System for Growing Plants in Water by Tyler Baras - No soil? No sunlight? No problem. A hydroponic growing system gives you the power to grow plants anywhere. Simply suspend your essential nutrients in a water-based solution and circulate them to the plant roots in a contained network of vessels and tubes. Sound easy? In a way, it is. But it also requires plenty of solid information to succeed, which is why you need DIY Hydroponic Gardens. With practical information aimed at home do-it-youselfers, author Tyler Baras (Farmer Tyler to his fans) shows exactly how to build, plant, and maintain over a dozen unique hydroponic systems, some costing just a few dollars to make. Farmer Tyler shows you, with detailed step-by-step photos, precisely how to create these systems, and how to plant and maintain them. All the information you need to get started with your home hydroponics system is included: recipes for nutrient solutions; light and ventilation sources; comprehensive and maintenance instructions; 12+ hydroponic system builds; and complete crop selection charts.

The Garden in Every Sense and Season: Gardening to Awaken Your Five Senses by Tovah Martin - So much of gardening is focused on the long list of chores—the weeding, planting, and pruning. But what about the joy a garden can provide? In The Garden in Every Sense and Season, Tovah Martin explores the sensory delights in her own garden in 100 evocative essays. Martin shares sage garden advice, offers intimate reflections on her own garden, and urges us to inhale, savor, and become more attuned to our gardens. Packed with lush color photographs, The Garden in Every Sense and Season will help you grow a bounty of gratitude in your own home garden.

Gardening Complete: How to Best Grow Vegetables, Flowers, and Other Outdoor Plants by the editors of Cool Spring Press - Gardening Complete is the most up-to-date and complete guide to gardening for homeowners. Inside, eight of North America’s top gardening experts—and Cool Springs Press authors—present 19 subjects of critical interest to anyone who wants to learn or broaden gardening skills. Whether your main interest is in designing landscapes and gardens, ornamental gardening to make your yard more attractive, or gardening to provide nutritious edibles for the family table, this book will become your definitive source of information. It is intended for serious beginning to intermediate gardeners, but even veteran gardeners will be intrigued by what these experts have to say about core gardening skills and common horticultural subjects.

Grow Something Different to Eat: Weird and Wonderful Heirloom Fruits and Vegetables For Your Garden by Matthew Biggs - Whether you're a beginner and determined to make the most of limited space with a truly unique and heirloom harvest, or a seasoned grower looking to spice up your cooking with gourmet flavors, the step-by-step instructions give you the confidence to grow some unusually tasty crops. Choose from fruiting vegetables such as orange eggplants and hyacinth beans, salad greens such as fiddlehead ferns and sushi hostas, grains such as quinoa and chia, and luscious fruits such as honeyberries and white strawberries. All plants can be started indoors and transplanted, grown outdoors in the garden, or kept as houseplants. With versatile gardening advice for growing in a variety of spaces and situations, plus cooking suggestions and preserving options, a weird and wonderful harvest is guaranteed.

Harvest: Unexpected Projects Using 47 Extraordinary Garden Plants by Stefani Bittner & Alethea Harampolis - Every garden--not just vegetable plots--can produce a bountiful harvest! This practical, inspirational, and seasonal guide will help make any garden more productive and enjoyable with a variety of projects using unexpected and often common garden plants, some of which may already be growing in your backyard.
Discover the surprising usefulness of petals and leaves, roots, seeds, and fruit: turn tumeric root into a natural dye and calamintha into lip balm. Make anise hyssop into a refreshing iced tea and turn apricots into a facial mask. Crabapple branches can be used to create stunning floral arrangements, oregano flowers to infuse vinegar, and edible chrysanthemum to liven up a salad. With the remarkable, multi-purpose plants in Harvest, there is always something for gardeners to harvest from one growing season to the next.

No-Waste Kitchen Gardening: Regrow Your Leftover Greens, Stalks, Seeds, and More by Katie Elzer-Peters - No-Waste Kitchen Gardening is a fun and colorful exploration of the amazing results you can get by re-growing vegetable cutoffs and scraps into harvestable, edible plants. Stop tossing your carrot stumps, loose cilantro sprigs, lettuce and cabbage stalks, and apple cores in the trash! The expert advice in No-Waste Kitchen Gardening, gives you all the instruction and tricks you'll need to grow and re-propagate produce from food waste. You'll be astonished at how much food waste you can re-grow. You'll also find some helpful general information about growing indoors and maintaining your re-grown plants. Two-part photo instructions show first what the root, chunk seed, or leaf should look like when you re-plant it, and second, when to harvest or re-plant it in soil to continue growing.

Root, Nurture, Grow: The Essential Guide to Propagating and Sharing Houseplants by Caro Langton & Rose Ray - You've created your own house of plants, so what's next? The authors of House of Plants follow up their successful debut book with Root, Nurture, Grow – a practical and detailed guide to propagating and sharing indoor plants.
The stylish handbook shows you how to make the most of your favorite houseplants through simple, beginner-friendly propagation techniques (such as stem cutting, rooting in water, runners, offsets, grafting, division and more), as well as resourceful DIY projects including homemade rooting mediums, seed-bombs, and a self-watering plant pot.
It shows you how to look after and nurture your new plant babies, and how to share them with friends by making beautiful gifts and displays.

Starting and Saving Seeds: Grow the Perfect Vegetables, Fruits, Herbs, and Flowers For Your Garden by Julie Thompson-Adolf - Are you ready to become a seed-starting and -saving champion? Author and gardening expert Julie Thompson-Adolf will walk you through every step of the journey, making the entire process a joy. In this book you'll find: Extensive plant entries that cover all the most popular vegetables, fruits, herbs, and flowers; Tips and hints, such as how to encourage stubborn seeds to germinate; Lists to help you find the best plants to add to your garden, whether you want heirloom tomatoes for hot, humid climates or a rainbow of eggplants; Simple DIY projects to aid your seed-starting and -saving adventure; And much more! Whether you're an experienced gardener new to seed starting and saving or a brand-new grower, you'll soon have health, productive, beautiful plants for your garden. 

The Thoughtful Gardener: An Intelligent Approach to Garden Design by Jinny Blom - A prolific designer, Jinny Blom embraces a wide variety of styles, from formal walled gardens to contemporary installations. What defines her work is her skill with plants and her ability to create a garden that responds to the history of the site and the wider landscape. In this book, Jinny shares her insight into the creative process she has developed while designing more than 250 gardens around the world.
The gardens Jinny creates are as different as their owners and their locations. Small gardens are very intimate and have to work efficiently in order to be pleasing. An Oxfordshire garden of rooms is constructed from nothing, creating a new garden with an old soul. There are modern takes on traditional forms.
But all these gardens share a commitment to beautiful craftsmanship and considered planting. Structure and detail are important, and receive close attention. The styles vary considerably – logical, calm, beautiful, romantic, naturalistic, formal, sometimes spare – but the principles remain firm. Jinny designs for the long term, with consideration for the environment; these gardens are built to last.
Reflecting Jinny‘s highly individual character, there is plenty of wit and quirkiness alongside the expert knowledge, and it will appeal to the widest audience of garden lovers. Thoughtful and beautiful, yet practical and informative, this book marries artistry with functionality.