I love helping things grow. I admit it, I’m a pretty superficial gardener. I like to grow things you can eat. If you can’t eat it, but it grows large (sunflowers, gourds, and pumpkins and such – no one at my house eats pumpkins), that’s OK too. Gardening is very much an avocation, and one that I don’t like to get too bookish on. A lot of my reading about gardening is from the catalogs of seed companies. Three seed companies that I think are great are:

• Territorial Seed
• Nichols Garden Nursery
• Seeds For Change

But I have, on occasion, actually read a book or two on gardening. One that was influential was Square Foot Gardening, by Mel Bartholomew. It’s been said the three great tradeoffs are time, space, and money. The square foot gardening approach trades off time for space. It’s actually not that time consuming, but spending a bit of time thinking about what your garden will do, and planning to use space as efficiently as possible was definitely a new way of thinking for me.

A book that I’ve used more as a reference than for entertainment is the Sunset Western Garden Book. This book has an amazing amount of information for gardeners of all flavors. It provides a fair amount of information that is very specific to particular locations in the western US, but the majority of it applies to everyone. More gardening information that you can shake a hoe at, well organized and ready to eat.

Another book that frequently gets referenced is Rodale’s Garden Insect, Disease, and Weed Identification Guide. Here’s a full color guide to the problems plaguing your garden, complete with explanations and recommendations.

Here’s wishing you a successful summer in the garden!