9 Books for Backyard Gardeners

gifts for gardeners

Searching for the perfect book to give the gardener in your life? These 8 books are great gifts for gardeners at any level.

Head over to our Gardening page for even more great gardening reads!


gifts for gardenersIn The Home-Scale Forest Garden, Dani Baker shares what she learned as she became a forest gardener, providing a practical, in-depth guide to creating a beautiful, bountiful edible landscape at any scale—from a few dozen square feet to an acre or more.

This is the perfect guide for gardeners of all experience levels who want to work with nature’s model and expand the range of food crops they grow as they embark on their own forest garden adventure.

 

Featured Excerpts

How to Make a Plant Grouping

The Seven Layers of A Forest Garden

→ Read the Book… 

 


gifts for gardeners Year-Round Indoor Salad Gardening offers good news: with nothing more than a cupboard and a windowsill, you can grow all the fresh salad greens you need for the winter months (or throughout the entire year) with no lights, no pumps, and no greenhouse.

This book is a revolutionary and inviting guide for both first-time and experienced gardeners in rural or urban environments. All you need is a windowsill or two. Year-Round Indoor Salad Gardening offers detailed step-by-step instructions to mastering this method (hint: it’s impossible not to succeed, it’s so easy!).

 

Featured Excerpts

Must Have Tools for Successful Indoor Gardening

No Garden? No Problem! Grow Your Own Salad Indoors

→ Read the Book… 

 


gifts for gardeners Many people mistakenly think that ecological gardening—which involves growing a wide range of edible and other useful plants—can take place only on a large, multiacre scale. As Toby Hemenway demonstrates, it’s fun and easy to create a “backyard ecosystem” by assembling communities of plants that can work cooperatively and perform a variety of functions.

Whatever size yard or garden you have to work with, you can apply basic permaculture principles to make it more diverse, more natural, more productive, and more beautiful. Best of all, once it’s established, an ecological garden will reduce or eliminate most of the backbreaking work that’s needed to maintain the typical lawn and garden.

Featured Excerpts

Designing a Forest Garden: The Seven-Layer Garden

Interplanting and Beyond

→ Read the Book… 


gifts for gardeners In The Regenerative Grower’s Guide to Garden Amendments, experimental gardener and author Nigel Palmer provides practical, detailed instructions that are accessible to every grower who wants to achieve a truly sustainable garden ecosystem—all while enjoying better results at a fraction of the cost of commercial fertilizer products.

The Regenerative Grower’s Guide to Garden Amendments also includes a primer on plant-soil interaction, instructions for conducting a soil test, and guidance on compost, cover cropping, mulching, measuring the quality of fruits and vegetables using a refractometer, and other aspects of sustainable gardening—making it a must-have resource for  any serious grower.

 

Featured Excerpts

From the Ground Up: Using Soil Amendments

A Drink Only a Garden Could Love: Fermented Plant Juice

→ Read the Book… 

 


gifts for gardeners Scientist/gardener Carol Deppe combines her passion for organic gardening with newly emerging scientific information from many fields — resilience science, climatology, climate change, ecology, anthropology, paleontology, sustainable agriculture, nutrition, health, and medicine.

The Resilient Gardener is both a conceptual and a hands-on organic gardening book, and is suitable for vegetable gardeners at all levels of experience. It is a supremely optimistic as well as realistic book about how resilient gardeners and their vegetable gardens can flourish even in challenging times and help their communities to survive and thrive through everything that comes their way — from tomorrow through the next thousand years.

Featured Excerpts

To Garden is to be Resilient

Food in Uncertain Times: How to Grow and Store the 5 Crops You Need to Survive

→ Read the Book…


gifts for gardeners

“So much thoughtful insight and practical advice is contained in these pages…Jane uses nature as a guide to living life in harmony rather than discord.”—Rosemary Gladstar, author of Rosemary Gladstar’s Medicinal Herbs

Gardeners of every level of experience will find new insights, ideas, and inspiration in this unusual, beautiful, and highly practical guide to the simple yet expansive art of consulting with the cosmos to inform our garden tasks on any given day, week, or month and enjoy greater gardening satisfaction and success.

 

Featured Excerpts

Keeping Seeds Organized: Saving & Storing

→ Read the Book… 

 

 

 


gifts for gardeners

“If you wish to live well and eat well no matter what is going on in the rest of the world, this book is for you…Will Bonsall will help you enjoy the good life under any and all conditions.”—Eliot Coleman, author of The New Organic Grower 

In a friendly, almost conversational way, Will Bonsall imparts a wealth of knowledge drawn from his more than forty years of farming experience. “My goal,” he writes, “is not to feed the world, but to feed myself and let others feed themselves. If we all did that, it might be a good beginning.”

Featured Excerpts

Composting as if it Mattered

How to Make Your Own Mulch with Fallen Leaves

→  Read the Book…

 


gifts for gardenersWhether you’re an experienced gardener, homesteader, or market farmer, this A–Z, soil-to-table guide shows you how to reduce chemical inputs; naturally enrich your growing ecology; and create a hardy, nutrient-dense, and delicious crop.

In The Healthy Vegetable Garden, expert organic gardener Sally Morgan explains how to use natural approaches to cope with the challenges of a changing climate through principles from regenerative gardening, agroecology, and permaculture—all to help your green space thrive.

 

Featured Excerpts

Why Mulch Matters: Mulching 101

10 Easy-to-Grow Flowers for Pest Control

→ Read the Book… 

 


Recommended Reads

10 Books to Gift the Homesteader in Your Life

Gifts They’ll Crave: 10 Books for Every Foodie on Your List

Recent Articles

soil health

5 Principles of Soil Health

Wondering how to make your soil (and plants) thrive? Use these principles of soil health to properly prepare your farm or garden to grow. The following excerpt is from Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown. It has been adapted for the web. (Photography curtesy of Gabe Brown.) Prefer audio? Listen to the excerpt below from the…

Read More

How to Create Your Own Forest Garden

A forest garden provides a beautiful, bountiful edible landscape at any scale—whether only a few dozen square feet or if you have over an acre to spare. Ready to embark on your own forest garden adventure? Check out these articles for inspiration to get started. Featured image by Dani Baker. The Seven Layers of A…

Read More
permanent beds

Permanent Beds: Designing An Efficient Garden

Permanent beds are going to change your gardening game. This type of garden bed helps improve soil health, ensures crop growth, and is extremely easy to design! The following is an excerpt from The Living Soil Handbook by Jesse Frost. It has been adapted for the web. Designing Permanent Beds The term permanent beds is…

Read More
seed integrity

Preserving Seed Integrity: How Far is Far Enough?

While there is a lot of information out there about keeping the “purity” of seeds, the true “pure” seed is a myth. There are still best practices that any seed grower should keep in mind; but once they understand seed integrity and let cross-pollination happen, the real fun begins. The following is an excerpt from…

Read More
planting site

7 Factors to Consider When Choosing a Planting Site

With spring starting soon, now is the perfect time to start planning out your garden. For those new to gardening or homesteading, the location of your planting site is one of the first things to consider. The following is an excerpt from Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts by Scott Serrano and Allyson Levy. It has been…

Read More