Vegetable Gardening for Beginners: A Simple Guide to Growing Vegetables at Home

Easy to follow and informative.

Very informative I feel this will be badly needed in the condition of our country .

Good book for rookies I just can’t get my husband on board for a veggie garden

Loved this book. Great to start gardening.

Looking over this book, I think it will be the perfect gift for my son who has just gotten into growing his own vegetables at his new house. He needed a little help this year. Had way too many cucumbers and his green onions didn't grow good at all. He also had trouble with watermelons and corn.

I picked up some pointers in this book. I guess I'm not exactly a beginner at this point since I've been taking care of someone else's established garden for about 9 years. So I have found out about some of this stuff over those years by talking to other people and on the internet. Some of the information in this book doesn't apply for me since I don't start plants indoors and I don't used raised beds. So I didn't read all the pages in this book. However we do usually get tomatoes that were started by somebody else in a greenhouse or maybe some from places like Home Depot. Some things I've learned and can recommend are: Get your soil tested by Cooperative Extension or someplace like that. With fertilizers more is not always better. My cucumber plants keep giving me a lot of foliage and flowers but not very many cucumbers. There's too much organic material (manure) in my soil and the pH level of the soil is 7.6 which is too alkaline. My soil report says all it needs is small amounts of nitrogen fertilizer right now and only at the beginning of the season. I have saved myself many hours of backbreaking work by covering the empty rows between the plants with a weed barrier fabric. These fabrics allow air and water to get into the soil but it blocks the sunlight to kill the weeds. This book mentions using mulch for the same purpose which I may do for the spaces between the individual tomato plants. Most cucumber varieties are designed by Nature to climb like a vine. I built some simple circular cages that I place around my cucumber mounds. I use the thin fencing wire with the square openings in it. I tie them into a circle with zip ties. You can make four cuts into the wire where four of the squares intersect. Remove the cross shaped cutout and bend the cut wires back to create a place to reach your hand into the cage. Wear gloves and safety glasses when working with this type or wire. The cut off ends of the wire are sharp and they can swing back and hit someone in the eye. Cut off or bend back the cut off wires at both ends of the cage also. Books like this talk about organic gardening methods which can apparently take a few years to work well. I use the deadly SEVIN pesticide when my plants first start growing and I even spray the SEVIN into the soil within the rows. But then I switch over to organic pesticides when the plants start getting flowers so as not to harm the bees. I may switch over to soaker hoses this year for watering. Soaker hoses don't get the leaves of the plants wet. Wet leaves can cause fungal diseases like powdery mildew on cucumbers and zucchini. There are traps that come with bait that are specifically designed to catch Japanese beetles which appear in large numbers at certain times of the year. Here's a bee safe product to kill the dreaded squash borer moth which destroys zucchini plants: Safer Brand 5163 Caterpillar Killer II Concentrate, 16 Oz

I bought this book for my husband who recently got into gardening when we bought our new house. He has 2 above ground garden boxes and wants to learn more about how to grow different things in our region so I bought him this book. He absolutely loves it because it provides basic information in a clear and concise format that's easy to follow. He keeps this book on his nightstand and reads it often.

It’s really wonderful EXCEPT it doesn’t show the zone for any of the vegetables in the book. It says zone: but does not have the zone for any of them which, yea, I could go look it up but it’s just dumb and annoying. Why even put “zone” in there. Almost feels like a trick. But good info for sure. Just that one little thing really irked me for some reason.

Really interesting little book, well written and nice illustrations too. A good introduction to vegetable growing, without the use of harsh chemicals or elaborate equipment.

Really a good book for beginners to build up the essential basics. I recommend this book.

As a general guide to vegetable growing it is a solid platform to start from.

Great book filled with so much information for those new to vegetable gardening. Companion plants are explained thoroughly i.e. what vegetables grow well together and what flowers help keep bugs away.

Lots of great information packed into this book.