Vegetable Gardening Made Easy: Simple Tips & Tricks to Grow Your Best Garden Ever by Resh Gala

Supercharge your food garden while reducing your workload with over 80 detailed solutions, techniques, and methods that resolve some of gardening’s most common challenges. Illustrated with gorgeous photographs of inspiring gardens, projects in process, and tempting homegrown vegetables, and authored by Resh Gala, a professional kitchen garden designer, Vegetable Gardening Made Easy is filled with valuable advice every food gardener can use. No matter the size of your garden or your experience level, backyard veggie gardeners like you can use the practical information found inside to grow a more productive (and beautiful!) edible garden. Discover an abundance of useful tidbits on everything from designing the garden and starting from seed to maximizing production, managing pests naturally, and preserving the harvest. Organized in a stylish and easy-to-use format that prevents overwhelm, each page explains and illustrates an essential piece of core advice, offering plenty of eco-friendly information to lead you to success without making you feel like you need a science degree to make it happen. The format is Read more

From the Publisher Planning, designing, and laying out the garden are crucial steps. You want it to be right the first time so you can avoid the headaches of a do-over. Think of your organic edible garden as an extension of your home and personality—you want your garden to look beautiful, be productive, and last for many years to come. Lay a solid foundation and you will avoid problems down the road. Have a vision for your garden. Should you sow seeds directly in the garden or transplant seedlings instead? If you live in a cold climate with a short growing season, transplanting seedlings after your last frost date will most definitely give you a head start and enable you to harvest fruits and vegetables sooner than if you had directly sown seeds instead. But direct sowing too has its place in the garden, especially for those plants that don’t like their roots being disturbed. One of the absolute best reasons to grow food in fall and winter is that cold-tolerant veggies taste so much sweeter than when they are grown in warmer months. Carrots, lettuce, even kale, and broccoli taste sweet like candy once they’ve been touched by frost. This is because the cold temperature causes the plant to convert starches into sugars as a survival mechanism. Did you know that plants belonging to the cucurbit family, such as cucumber, squash, and melons, have separate male and female flowers? Female flower can be identified by an immature, small fruit at the base of the flower. Male flowers will simply have a straight stem. Once you identify the male and female flowers, you can use various tools and techniques to hand-pollinate your plants and ensure a harvest.