The Vegetable Gardening Book: Your Complete Guide to Growing an Edible Organic Garden from Seed to Harvest

Lamp’l (Green Gardener’s Guide), host of the TV show Growing a Greener World, offers a master class on growing veggies with these savvy tips for beginners. He walks readers through the basics—choosing a site (go for the “sunniest spot you have to work with”), drawing out a master plan, maintaining soil health—and digs into plant nutrients, compost, and how to deal with pests and diseases (a layer of mulch, for example, halts the spread of soilborne pathogens). Elsewhere, Lamp’l offers a recipe for raised bed soil, explains how to start seeds, and describes the benefits of using a planting board—made from a scrap piece of lumber, it’s “the handiest tool you’ll ever want to have in the garden”—to space out seeds. Especially helpful is the encyclopedic growing guide to 40 vegetable varieties, with notes on planting, care, harvesting, and storage for each. Lamp’l covers a lot of ground, his advice is practical, and his tone genial: “A backyard vegetable garden may be a simple thing, but it can have a genuinely profound impact.” Gardeners ready to grow their own produce will find this worth returning to. (Sept.)