Gardening Books
*As seen in The New York Times, Martha Stewart, and NPR
“It’s time to rebuild meadows wherever we can. . . Owen Wormser explains why, and how to do this, with oodles of highly readable, ecologically sound advice.”—Douglas W. Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home and Nature’s Best Hope
Landscape designer Owen Wormser explains how to replace the deadscape we call lawn with low-maintenance, eco-friendly meadows. In this second edition of his award-winning book, he includes photos of meadows in progress plus more ways to cultivate your own organic meadow.
This how-to book on growing your own wildflowers and native grasses is also about sustainability, regeneration, and beauty. In a world where lawns have wreaked havoc on our natural ecosystems, meadows offer a compelling solution. It is garden landscaping that is beautiful, all year round.
Meadows establish wildlife and pollinator habitats, are low-maintenance and low-cost, have a built-in resilience that helps them weather climate extremes, and can draw down and store far more carbon dioxide than any manicured lawn.
Wormser describes how to plant an organic meadow garden or traditional meadow, that’s right for your site. His book includes guidance on:
Preparing your site
Designing your meadow
Planting without using synthetic chemicals
Growing 21 starter native grasses and wildflowers, including butterfly weed, smooth blue aster, purple coneflower, wild bergamot, blue grama grass, switchgrass, and many more
Building support in neighborhoods where a tidy lawn is the standard.
He also shares 28 color photos that highlight the multitude of ways you can cultivate your own organic meadow.
To illuminate the many joys of meadow-building, Wormser draws on his own stories, including how growing up off the grid in northern Maine, with no electricity or plumbing, prepared him for his work.
ISBN: 9781734901184 (paperback) Pages: 185 (with illustrations & photos) Size: 6 x 9
This beginner’s guide to growing your own herbs, fruits, and vegetables is for home gardeners who want to raise food on their own patch of soil—all while cultivating a microbe-rich, carbon-sucking, regenerative food scape.
To help us get started, Acadia Tucker, a regenerative gardener and climate activist, drafts plans for gardeners who have a little ground or a lot of it. She offers advice on:
How to prep and clear land without herbicides
Cultivate healthy soil
Plant food from seeds and starts
Fend off pests and disease organically
Grow 21 popular perennials and annuals, including fruit trees, herbs, strawberries, peppers, tomatoes, cabbage, carrots, garlic, beans, peas, and potatoes.
Tucker also describes the climate changes taking place in our own backyards, and the various steps we can take to boost a garden’s resilience. She invites us to think of gardening as civic action. By building organically-rich soil, even in a backyard, we can capture greenhouse gases in the very place we’re growing nutritious food.
Growing Good Food includes calls to action and insights from leaders in the regenerative growing movement, including David Montgomery, Anne Biklé, Gabe Brown, Wendell Berry and Mary Berry, and Tim LaSalle. By the end of this book, you'll know how to grow some really good food, and build a healthier world, too.
ISBN: 9780998862330 (paperback); Pages: 168; Size: 6 x 9
Acadia Tucker’s long love affair with perennial foods has produced this easy-to-understand guide to growing, harvesting, and eating them.
A regenerative farmer and gardener deeply concerned about global warming, Tucker believes there may be no better time to plant perennials. Sturdy and deep-rooted, perennials can weather climate extremes more easily than annuals. They can thrive without chemical fertilizers and pesticides. And they don’t need as much water, either.
These long-lived plants also help build healthy soil, turning the very ground we stand on into a carbon sponge.
In this book, Tucker lays the groundwork for tending an organic, sustainable garden. She includes practical growing guides for 34 popular perennials, among them, basil, blueberries, grapes, strawberries, artichokes, asparagus, garlic, radicchio, spinach, and sweet potatoes, and wraps in a recipe for each of the plants profiled.
Growing Perennial Foods is for gardeners who want more resilient plants. It’s for people who want to do something about climate change and the environment. It’s for anyone who has ever wanted to grow food, and is ready to begin. (See book excerpt.)
Peek inside Growing Perennial Foods.
ISBN: 9780998862354 (paperback); Pages: 280; Size: 6 x 9
Regenerative farmer Acadia Tucker proves it’s possible to grow food without land. In this, her third easy-to-use gardening guide, Tucker describes how to cultivate bountiful container food gardens in pots, planters, and raised beds.
Climate activist and farmer Acadia Tucker fell in love with container gardening after glimpsing its potential to produce food—lots of food. By applying select growing practices, and managing for square inches rather than square feet, she has come up with instructions for growing a small-scale farm on your windowsill, your patio, or in your dining room.
Her book, loaded with helpful illustrations, includes:
Tips on how to grow 21 vegetables in pots, including tomatoes, peppers, and beans
Recipes for cultivating potted vegetable gardens
Tips on finding the right container
Information on designing for small spaces—and making food gardens beautiful
Guidance on how to raise crops in pots all year long
Tucker also describes how to maximize the environmental impact of growing food in pots. She offers tips on attracting pollinators, shows how to build microbe-rich living soil, and explains ways to ditch harmful pesticides and fertilizers. Her goal is to make it easier for anyone with access to a patch of sun to grow food, no backyard required.
ISBN: 9781734901108; SIZE: 6 x 9
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