I have a severe gardening book addiction, and I don’t want any help to make it stop. Instead, I will continue to buy bookshelves to house my many wonderful books. As we prepare for another growing season, I want to share some of my favorites so you can also benefit from their valuable growing advice. If you get your hands on one of these, I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.
Nettles & Petals: Grow Food. Eat Weeds. Save Seeds (By Jamie Walton)
Anyone who follows Instagram personality Jamie Walton (@nettlesandpetals) will be pumped to learn he’s written a guide to making your garden more sustainable. The ecological horticulturist encourages his readers to view edible flowers and weeds as the new vegetables and foraging as our new favorite outdoor activity. With beautiful photography gracing his pages, he digs into other topics like seed-saving, growing wild plants, circular gardening, and promoting biodiversity. Walton uncovers the overlooked potential of wild plant species and offers growing instructions to his top 30 veggies. He provides plans for urban and small-scale gardeners and tips on harvesting, preserving, and sharing produce. Nettles & Petals is perfect for beginner gardeners curious about growing holistically, more seasoned ones looking to make sustainable changes, foragers, and anyone with access to a growing space or nettle patch.
Order Nettles & Petals: Grow Food. Eat Weeds. Save Seeds online!
Square Foot Gardening – 4th Edition (Updated by Laura and Steve Bartholomew)
It’s the update we’ve all been waiting for: 40 years after Mel Bartholomew introduced the world to the square foot gardening (SFG) method, Laura and Steve Bartholomew have come out with a fourth edition to Square Foot Gardening. This latest edition obeys the original principles of SFG with a focus on being flexible and making your garden your own. It contains a quick reference plant spacing guide, step-by-step instructions for building, planting, and maintaining an SFG bed, and answers to people’s most common questions about growing in grids. It’s touted as the most complete and accessible edition yet! You’ll learn that you can quickly produce a ton of food with little space and that the SFG method is perfect for organic gardeners looking to cut down on inputs and waste. Despite being ‘over the hill,’ square-foot gardening is still highly relevant to modern growers, especially city dwellers!
Grab a copy of Square Foot Gardening to grow your best garden ever.
Go Forth and Forage (By Whitney Johnson)
If foraging is our new favorite outdoor activity, we should do it right. Thankfully, Whitney Johnson (@appalachian_forager) has our backs with a guide to foraging over 50 of the most common edible and medicinal mushrooms in North America. Plain and simple, this book is beautifully photographed and contains some of the most comprehensive knowledge about foraging wild mushrooms; you’ll learn how to correctly identify, harvest, and prepare them through all four seasons! Morels and woodears are abundant in the spring and are followed by black trumpets, chicken of the woods, and bolets throughout the summer. Learn how to track down and handle harvests of lion’s mane, oyster, and enoki in the fall and winter. Whitney offers technical advice on using spore prints to help confirm proper identification and words of wisdom on what we should do before taking a bite. She busts some common mushroom myths and, perhaps most importantly, tips on being a responsible and ethical forager. Go Forth and Forage is a must-have for amateur and serious mushroom foraging enthusiasts.
Order your copy so you can boost your ethical foraging game!
Plants with Superpowers (By David Domoney)
Nature is always ready to impress, and this book by UK plant enthusiast David Domoney does the same. Plants with Superpowers: 75 Remarkable Plants for your Garden and Home features the most incredible plants with extraordinary capabilities. For instance, did you know that a potato can charge your cell phone? A Venus fly trap has a memory and can count, snowdrops produce anti-freeze, and the Scots pine can predict the weather. These amazing facts are fun to read and may help you with plant selection in the future because who doesn’t want to build a magical garden? Oh, by the way, if you need to make a magic wand, the best wood to use is Blackthorn! Don’t skip this book; you’ll be in awe of Mother Nature’s superpowers.
Find your copy online and in most major bookstores.
Bad Naturalist (Paula Whyman)
Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop is a must-read for anyone looking for something light and witty. Paula Whyman’s humility and humor jump off the pages as she recounts her experience restoring 200 acres of depleted farmland. Despite many setbacks and conflicting advice, she finds life and hope growing in the mountains, including native elderberries, wild bergamot, and jewelweed. Paula sees pollinators doing their work and hears songbirds calling; some of her plans eventually fall into place. This book inspires anyone overwhelmed by the daunting task of bringing an outdoor space back to its natural glory; it will give you hope and make you laugh, and that’s pretty much the perfect read.
