Product Review
A Backyard-Gardener’s Guide to Growing a Bountiful, Great-Tasting Harvest
The Complete Vegetable & Herb Gardener features:
- A full-color encyclopedia of over 100 vegetables and herbs with detailed, expert advice on growing them successfully from planting to harvest
- Planting and growing techniques that keep maintenance to a minimum
- Entries on how to grow unusual edibles, such as refreshing mesclun for salads, colorful edible flowers, spicy mustards, and more
- Descriptions and photos of a host of succulent vegetables, both hybrids and heirlooms, from common to exotic
- Complete information on improving even the poorest garden soil using safe, organic techniques, plus practical advice on making compost
- Recommendations on garden tools you need–and those you don’t
- Information on controlling pests and diseases organically, without resorting to poisonous sprays
- Spectacular full-color photographs of vegetables and herbs, food gardens, and edible landscapes, plus 30 black-and-white line drawings
Product Description
A Backyard-Gardener’s Guide to Growing a Bountiful, Great-Tasting Harvest
The Complete Vegetable & Herb Gardener features:
- A full-color encyclopedia of over 100 vegetables and herbs with detailed, expert advice on growing them successfully from planting to harvest
- Planting and growing techniques that keep maintenance to a minimum
- Entries on how to grow unusual edibles, such as refreshing mesclun for salads, colorful edible flowers, spicy mustards, and more
- Descriptions and photos of a host of succulent vegetables, both hybrids and heirlooms, from common to exotic
- Complete information on improving even the poorest garden soil using safe, organic techniques, plus practical advice on making compost
- Recommendations on garden tools you need–and those you don’t
- Information on controlling pests and diseases organically, without resorting to poisonous sprays
- Spectacular full-color photographs of vegetables and herbs, food gardens, and edible landscapes, plus 30 black-and-white line drawings
Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
(40 customer reviews) 173 of 173 people found the following review helpful
Simply the BEST gardening book around.,
April 1, 2001 Life and Things "diamonds" (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Burpee : The Complete Vegetable & Herb Gardener : A Guide to Growing Your Garden Organically (Hardcover)
This book could easily be worth $50 and it would be worth the investment. I've been a gardener for a number of years, and out of the entire bookshelf of gardening books that i own, this book, hands down, is far more comprehensive than all of them put together. The first section of the book, a complete book in intself, will teach you just about everything you ever wanted to know about almost every aspect of gardening, and is comprehensive enough that if you learned it all you would be well on your way to becoming a master gardener. The second section, the plant portraits, gives you more information about each vegatable and herb in your garden than you could ever dream of knowing about, and more information than you would even be able to find. Like tomatoes? there are almost eight pages dedicated to them alone. The entire book is filled with beautiful color photographs, and it is packed with tons of hard-core information. Not like the "fluff" and tons of meaningless words...Read more
77 of 78 people found the following review helpful
Vegatable Gardening Made Really Easy,
November 1, 2001 Richard Szkodzinski (USA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Burpee : The Complete Vegetable & Herb Gardener : A Guide to Growing Your Garden Organically (Hardcover)
Very similar in content and structure to Ortho's Complete Guide to Vegtables. The difference comes in the experience the writer has growing and maitaining the various plants. I find using both books gives different perspectives for growing and caretaking of plants but conatins the same basic information. For instance the Ortho book has better Garden Setup and maintenance data, and raw data on the various gardening aspects like fertilizer and pest eradiction. The Burpee book focuses on plant and cultivar details a little better. The book is filled with plenty high quality pictures of plants and their fruits using multiple pictures of various cultivars within plant families.
The book is geared for both beginners in gardening and the handy do it yourselfer types. Chapters progress you through the steps from site selection and plant selection to harvesting, crop rotating and soil conditioning over winter and indoor greenhouse seed starting. The book also contains references to...Read more
54 of 54 people found the following review helpful
Perfect for the beginner!,
August 3, 2001 John G. Maylone (Tollhouse, California) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Burpee : The Complete Vegetable & Herb Gardener : A Guide to Growing Your Garden Organically (Hardcover)
I've dabbled with vegetable gardening all my life. Now that I'm retired, I wanted to get serious about it and expand my postage stamp garden. It doesn't take a lot of skill to grow tomatoes this close to California's central valleys and I wanted to go beyond the slam dunk crops and grow a variety of things that I enjoy eating. The Burpee book is perfect for my purposes. It has two major parts; the first section deals with gardening in general and provides a broad base of information on how to prepare for and raise your own vegetables. The second part is an alphabetical tour of more than 100 of the most commonly grown vegetables with a general description of each vegetable or herb and its varieties, and some specifics on how to grow and harvest that particular plant. I was looking for a single reference book that would get me into some serious vegetable gardening, and I hit the jackpot with this book. It is definitely a keeper. I won't say that I'll never need another...Read more
