Cool Plants for Cold Climates


Book Description

A cold climate is no excuse for a dull, colorless garden. The key is knowing the right plants that will survive and thrive in even the chilliest environments. Who better to guide gardeners than an expert from the far north? Award-winning designer and Alaska gardener Brenda Adams has spent decades searching for exceptional plants that flourish in wintery climates. In Cool Plants for Cold Climates, she presents vivid and detailed portraits of the best and most beautiful of the bunch. When Adams moved from the warm Southwest to Alaska, she found herself in a different gardening world, with few guides on how to approach this new ecosystem. Now, more than twenty-five years later, she shares the secrets gained from her years of gardening experiments as well as bountiful advice from friends and local nurseries. She explains how to evaluate a plant, balancing its artistic attributes with its more utilitarian ones, as well as how to evaluate your space and soil. Adams then takes you into the nursery, offering guidance on how to pick the best of the best. Finally, she offers a detailed look at a wide variety of wonderful plants, highlighting those that offer overall beauty, are especially easy to care for, and solidly hardy. With more than three hundred vivid pictures of both individual plants and full gardens, Adams proves that there is a bounty of plants, in a rainbow of colors, waiting to brighten up your space.




Hot Plants for Cool Climates


Book Description

Passionate gardeners in cooler climates struggle year after year to overwinter their gorgeous tropical plants. Our new paperback edition is the answer to their problem — practical advice for achieving the tropical look in a temperate garden. The authors, who both live and garden on Long Island, New York, reveal the secrets to creating a lush, flamboyant landscape. Separate chapters cover such topics as principles of design and maintenance, proper plant selection, container gardening, and overwintering. Fantastic color photography throughout will inspire gardeners in even the hardiest zones. With the help of this book, an impressive tropical garden is within any gardener's reach.




The Prairie Homestead Cookbook


Book Description

Jill Winger, creator of the award-winning blog The Prairie Homestead, introduces her debut The Prairie Homestead Cookbook, including 100+ delicious, wholesome recipes made with fresh ingredients to bring the flavors and spirit of homestead cooking to any kitchen table. With a foreword by bestselling author Joel Salatin The Pioneer Woman Cooks meets 100 Days of Real Food, on the Wyoming prairie. While Jill produces much of her own food on her Wyoming ranch, you don’t have to grow all—or even any—of your own food to cook and eat like a homesteader. Jill teaches people how to make delicious traditional American comfort food recipes with whole ingredients and shows that you don’t have to use obscure items to enjoy this lifestyle. And as a busy mother of three, Jill knows how to make recipes easy and delicious for all ages. "Jill takes you on an insightful and delicious journey of becoming a homesteader. This book is packed with so much easy to follow, practical, hands-on information about steps you can take towards integrating homesteading into your life. It is packed full of exciting and mouth-watering recipes and heartwarming stories of her unique adventure into homesteading. These recipes are ones I know I will be using regularly in my kitchen." - Eve Kilcher These 109 recipes include her family’s favorites, with maple-glazed pork chops, butternut Alfredo pasta, and browned butter skillet corn. Jill also shares 17 bonus recipes for homemade sauces, salt rubs, sour cream, and the like—staples that many people are surprised to learn you can make yourself. Beyond these recipes, The Prairie Homestead Cookbook shares the tools and tips Jill has learned from life on the homestead, like how to churn your own butter, feed a family on a budget, and experience all the fulfilling satisfaction of a DIY lifestyle.




Growing Perennials in Cold Climates


Book Description

Originally published: Lincolnwood, Ill.: Contemporary Books, c1998.




Growing Figs in Cold Climates


Book Description

Discover how to grow fresh figs organically in cold climates—from Minnesota to Moscow—with the help of this informative guide. Growing Figs in Cold Climates is a complete, full-color, illustrated guide to organic methods for growing delicious figs in cold climates, well outside the traditional hot, arid home of this ancient fruiting tree. Coverage includes: Five methods for growing figs in cold climates including overwintering Cultivar selection for cool and cold climates Pruning techniques for a variety of methods of growing figs in cold climates Pest problems and solutions Harvesting, including ways to speed ripening, identify ripe fruit, and manage an overabundance Small-scale commercial fig production in cold climates Fresh figs are juicy, full-bodied, and filled with a honey-sweet flavor, and because truly ripe figs are highly perishable, they are only available to those who grow their own. By choosing the right cultivars and techniques, figs can be grown across cool and cold growing zones of North America, Europe, and beyond, putting them within reach of almost every gardener. Easy and delicious—if you can grow a houseplant, you can grow a fig. Praise for Growing Figs in Cold Climates “Lee Reich is a master at growing food, especially fruits, and his extensive personal knowledge about figs comes through clearly in his writings. . . . Follow his advice for growing figs and you are guaranteed success.” —Robert Pavlis, author, Garden Myths, Building Natural Ponds, and Soil Science for Gardeners, owner, Aspen Grove Gardens “We have grown this delicious fruit on Maine’s chilly coast, but Lee shows us how to do it even better.” —Barbara Damrosch and Eliot Coleman, farmers, Four Season Farm, authors




Cool Flowers


Book Description

Presents simple techniques for an early spring garden of color profiling 30 hardy annual flowers.




A Way to Garden


Book Description

“A Way to Garden prods us toward that ineffable place where we feel we belong; it’s a guide to living both in and out of the garden.” —The New York Times Book Review For Margaret Roach, gardening is more than a hobby, it’s a calling. Her unique approach, which she calls “horticultural how-to and woo-woo,” is a blend of vital information you need to memorize and intuitive steps you must simply feel and surrender to. In A Way to Garden, Roach imparts decades of garden wisdom on seasonal gardening, ornamental plants, vegetable gardening, design, gardening for wildlife, organic practices, and much more. She also challenges gardeners to think beyond their garden borders and to consider the ways gardening can enrich the world. Brimming with beautiful photographs of Roach’s own garden, A Way to Garden is practical, inspiring, and a must-have for every passionate gardener.




Sustainable Market Farming


Book Description

Growing for 100 - the complete year-round guide for the small-scale market grower. Across North America, an agricultural renaissance is unfolding. A growing number of market gardeners are emerging to feed our appetite for organic, regional produce. But most of the available resources on food production are aimed at the backyard or hobby gardener who wants to supplement their family's diet with a few homegrown fruits and vegetables. Targeted at serious growers in every climate zone, Sustainable Market Farming is a comprehensive manual for small-scale farmers raising organic crops sustainably on a few acres. Informed by the author's extensive experience growing a wide variety of fresh, organic vegetables and fruit to feed the approximately one hundred members of Twin Oaks Community in central Virginia, this practical guide provides: Detailed profiles of a full range of crops, addressing sowing, cultivation, rotation, succession, common pests and diseases, and harvest and storage Information about new, efficient techniques, season extension, and disease resistant varieties Farm-specific business skills to help ensure a successful, profitable enterprise Whether you are a beginning market grower or an established enterprise seeking to improve your skills, Sustainable Market Farming is an invaluable resource and a timely book for the maturing local agriculture movement.




Northern Garden Symphony


Book Description

Put the power of a garden planning pro to work for you! Northern Garden Symphony offers explanations and illustrations of the sequential blooms of ornamental perennials as a tool for garden design. The idea of sequential blooming, Fairbanks-famous author Cyndie Warbelow explains, is similar to the workings of a musical symphony, in which at least a portion of its stunning constituent plants is blooming at all times, even though they are not all blooming together. Given that perennial plants bloom for limited and specific periods of time during the growing season, Warbelow notes, it is crucial that a garden be designed with sequential blooming in mind. Yet this concept can often overwhelm and discourage gardeners. Using narrative, figures, photographs, and a groundbreaking set of layout charts that can aid even the most experienced horticulturist in the process of flower garden planning, Northern Garden Symphony gives gardeners the tools they need to be a successful northern perennial gardener.




Gardening in Eden


Book Description

"Though an old man," Thomas Jefferson wrote at Monticello, "I am but a young gardener." Every gardener is. In Gardening in Eden, we enter Arthur Vanderbilt's small enchanted world of the garden, where the old wooden trestle tables of a roadside nursery are covered in crazy quilts of spring color, where a catbird comes to eat raisins from one's hand, and a chipmunk demands a daily ration of salted cocktail nuts. We feel the oppressiveness of endless winter days, the magic of an old-fashioned snow day, the heady, healing qualities of wandering through a greenhouse on a frozen February afternoon, the restlessness of a gardener waiting for spring. With a sense of wonder and humor on each page, Arthur Vanderbilt takes us along with him to discover that for those who wait, watch, and labor in the garden, it's all happening right outside our windows.