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The essential guide to composting for all gardeners and enviromentally conscious people.

Composting is fast becoming a household word. Gardeners know it is the best way to feed the soil, while others look to composting as a way to dispose of grass clippings, autumn leaves, and tree trimmings. The Rodale Book of Composting offers:

• Easy-to-follow instructions for making and using compost
• Helpful tips for apartment dwellers, suburbanites, farmers and community leaders
• Ecologically sound solutions to growing waste disposal problems

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A greenhouse can be a garden's greatest asset: its nucleus and powerhouse. There are many ways of using it and a gardener can adopt one or all of them. In spring, you can start young plants from seed; raise tender perennials to fill gaps in the garden; give young vegetable plants a head start; sow early lettuce while the soil is too sticky to work outdoors. During spring and summer, you can raise greenhouse crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, aubergines and chillis. You'll be able to overwinter tender plants such as bananas and cannas. And the greenhouse can be a showcase full of beautiful, unusual and exotic plants.

Trained at Kew and for many years Glasshouse Supervisor at the RHS Garden at Wisley, Anne Swithinbank is the expert on greenhouse gardening, and in this book she comprehensively describes the techniques that will allow you to greatly expand the growing capabilities of your garden.

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With consumers seeking ways to do more with less money, The Small Budget Gardener is a must have for gardening on a budget. With helpful tips and advice, gardeners can create beautiful, healthy sustainable landscapes with recycled materials and limited resources. Author, Maureen Gilmer includes a chapter on food gardening and preserving precious resources.

Landscape designer and horticulturist, Maureen Gilmer has compiled years of gardening experience with advice on everything from amending the soil and fighting off pests and diseases in the garden, to sourcing and propagating plants, and creating landscapes and garden structures with free or recycled materials. The Small Budget Gardener addresses gardening while conserving water and minimizing energy dollars, creating an eco-friendly landscape, including a chapter on growing vegetables and offers creative ideas for adding garden structures and yard enhancements to the landscape.

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From the nation’s foremost historical preservation site comes a guide to traditional—and still relevant—methods and advice for planting and tending a productive vegetable garden. In a colonial-style garden, the broccoli is purple and “turkey” cucumbers grow to three feet long; oiled paper predates plastic for sheltering spring plants; and fermenting manure warms the seedlings. Finding inspiration and value in 18th-century plants, tools, and techniques, the gardeners at Colonial Williamsburg have discovered that these traditional vegetable-growing methods are perfectly at home in today’s modern organic gardens. After all, in the 18th century, organic gardening was the only type of gardening and local produce the only produce available.

Author Wesley Greene founded the Colonial Garden in Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area in 1996. He and his colleagues have painstakingly researched the ways the colonists planted and tended their vegetable and herb beds, most of which are more relevant than ever. Along with historical commentary and complete growing instructions for 50 delicious vegetables, including colonial varieties still available today, gardeners and folklorists will find weather-watching guidelines, planting techniques, and seedsaving advice for legumes, brassicas, alliums, root crops, nightshades, melons, squash, greens, and other curious and tender produce.

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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 a no-fail, 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.

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Jo Ann Gardner and her husband, Jigs, have been farming for nearly four decades, specializing in fruit, dairy, and herb products. Jo Ann herself makes and sells seventy-five cases of jams, jellies, and preserves a year. She knows her subject well—and this breezy, delightful reissue of her classic text is a testament to the continued relevance of her years of gardening knowledge. Whether an old hand or a novice, you’ll find The Old-Fashioned Fruit Garden enlightening and informative, not to mention enjoyable. In this updated and full-color edition of The Old-Fashioned Fruit Garden, Jo Ann takes you back to the basics.

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Across the country, a renaissance of local food, farming and place-based culinary traditions is taking hold. And yet something small, critically important and profoundly at risk is being overlooked in this local food resurgence: seeds. We are losing our seeds. Of the thousands of seed varieties available at the turn of the 20th century, 94 percent have been lost forever.

With a signature lyricism that once prompted a New York Times writer to proclaim her the Rachel Carson of the South, author Janisse Ray (Ecology of a Cracker Childhood) brings us the inspiring stories of ordinary gardeners whose aim is to save time-honored open-pollinated varieties like Old Time Tennessee muskmelon and Long County Longhorn okra-varieties that will be lost if people don't grow, save, and swap the seeds.

From rural Maine to Oregon's Palouse, Ray introduces readers to dozens of seed savers like the eccentric sociology professor she dubs "Tomato Man" and Maine farmer Will Bonsall, the "Noah" of seed saving who juggles hundreds of seeds, many grown by him, and him alone. And Ray tells her own story: of watching her grandmamma save squash seed; of her own first tiny garden at the edge of a junkyard; of falling in love with heirloom and local varieties as a young woman; and the one seed (Conch cowpea) that got away from her.

With a quiet urgency, The Seed Underground reminds us that while our underlying health, food security and sovereignty may be at stake as seeds disappear, so, too, are the stories, heritage and history that passes between people as seeds are passed from hand to hand.

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Eating fruit is good for you and an essential part of your "five a day." Growing your own is even better.

The perfect companion book to Grow Your Own Vegetables (which sold 6,500 copies in its first two months of publication), Grow Your Own Fruit is the second offering from expert gardener Carol Klein. In this beautifully photographed book, she once again offers impeccable advice on growing the freshest, most nutritious and organic produce.

This time, Klein reveals the skills you need to nurture 40 different fruits from plot to plate. With her usual energy and enthusiasm, Klein offers green-thumbed advice for growing all your appetizing favorites as well as less familiar fruits such as lemons, figs, blueberries and cranberries. Her approach is environmentally friendly and easy.

Printed on wood-free matte paper, this book includes information on growing fruit in all environments … whether planting in a garden, communal plot, raised bed, container or window box. An ideal gift for beginners and experienced gardeners alike, this inspirational book is packed full of wisdom, making it an indispensable fruit reference for every gardener's bookshelf.

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Eating vegetables is good for you. Growing your own is even better.

"You are what you eat" may be a timeworn adage, but it makes a valid point. When you grow your own vegetables, you'll not only eat better food, but you'll also regain your connection to the seasons and the natural rhythms of life. Growing your own will change what's on your dinner table, and it will change you.

That's the philosophy behind Carol Klein's impeccably thorough guide to home vegetable gardening. In its pages, she reveals all the tricks to becoming a successful small-plot gardener, from preparing the soil to deciding what to grow (and when to plant and harvest). The book covers coping with pests, weeds, and other common problems, and its second half is a veritable encyclopedia of the vegetables that you might choose to grow: delicate salad greens, hardy root vegetables, and everything in between.

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Everyone committed to a natural, healthy and safe approach to gardening will consider Organic Kitchen Garden an essential reference.

This practical, beautiful and invaluable gardening resource shows how to grow your own food and discover the taste of fresh fruit and vegetables. The definitive organic vegetable gardening book, it explains how to set up your vegetable patch, prepare the soil, choose and care for your crops, and stagger your harvest across the seasons. Each chapter deals with a different crop, from salads, beans and brassicas to onions, potatoes and root vegetables. More unusual crops such as fennel, pak choi and sea kale are also covered. Helpful monthly lists remind you which jobs need doing when, and you'll keep your garden in fine fettle thanks to tips on composting, weed control, plant health care, watering, and pest and disease control.