Introductory and advanced techniques for gardening with bulbs, corms, rhizomes, and tubers.
Burpee Basics: Growing Guides for Easy, Colorful Gardens Down-to-earth handbooks for beginning gardeners "Our new series of concise gardening guidebooks continues Burpee's proud tradition of giving gardeners the essentials they need. These handy little books have a great deal in common with seeds: each one contains all you need to start a wonderful gardening experience.... Even the most experienced gardeners attend to the basic practices that you'll find so skillfully explained in these guides." ?George Ball, Jr., President of W. Atlee Burpee, from the Foreword Bulbs
A helpful, friendly introduction to the magical world of bulbs. The book was designed around the question most beginning bulb growers want to know: "When does it bloom?" The flowering classes are divided into seasonal bloom times, with a focus on widely available cultivars with basic cultivation needs.
- Jam-packed with accessible, quick-reference information on everything from bulb planting techniques to forcing bulbs and pest and disease control.
- Informative sidebars contain time-saving tips, practical garden advice, and solutions to common mistakes.
- Over 70 color photographs of bulb portraits and gardens, and instructional line drawings.
- Handy section lists mail order and garden supply sources and organizations.
- Includes U.S. and Canadian zone map.
From woodland glade to city courtyard, bulbs can transform a landscape, and with detailed instructions and a flair for the poetic, Rob Proctor shows you how and where, with little maintenance, they will flourish.
Enjoy a delicious bounty of heirloom vegetables every year. Marc Rogers guides you through the time-honored and cost-effective tradition of collecting seeds from this year's harvest to grow next year's crop. Learn how to select and store seeds from proven varieties of more than 100 common vegetables and flowers. Through saving seeds and growing heirloom plants you'll not only have a thriving garden every summer, you'll be saving money and preserving local flavors at the same time.
Community-based initiatives to preserve and protect our food supply
Historically, seed companies were generally small, often family-run businesses. Because they were regionally based, they could focus on varieties well-suited to the local environment. A Pacific Northwest company, for example, would specialize in different cultivars than a company based in the Southeast. However the absorption of these small, independent seed businesses into large multinationals, combined with the advancement of biotechnology resulting in hybrids and GMO seeds, has led to a serious loss of genetic diversity. The public is now at the mercy of the corporations that control the seeds.
In the past few years, gardeners have realized the inherent danger in this situation. A growing movement is striving to preserve and expand our stock of heritage and heirloom varieties through seed saving and sharing opportunities. Seed Libraries is a practical guide to saving seeds through community programs, including:
- Step-by-step instructions for setting up a seed library
- A wealth of ideas to help attract patrons and keep the momentum going
- Profiles of existing libraries and other types of seed saving partnerships
Whoever controls the seeds controls the food supply. By empowering communities to preserve and protect the genetic diversity of their harvest, Seed Libraries is the first step towards reclaiming our self-reliance while enhancing food security and ensuring that the future of food is healthy, vibrant, tasty, and nutritious.
Cindy Conner is a permaculture educator, founder of Homeplace Earth and producer of two popular instructional gardening DVDs. She is also the author of Grow a Sustainable Diet .
Seed to Seed is a complete seed-saving guide that describes specific techniques for saving the seeds of 160 different vegetables. This book contains detailed information about each vegetable, including its botanical classification, flower structure and means of pollination, required population size, isolation distance, techniques for caging or hand-pollination, and also the proper methods for harvesting, drying, cleaning, and storing the seeds.
Seed to Seed is widely acknowledged as the best guide available for home gardeners to learn effective ways to produce and store seeds on a small scale. The author has grown seed crops of every vegetable featured in the book, and has thoroughly researched and tested all of the techniques she recommends for the home garden.
This newly updated and greatly expanded Second Edition includes additional information about how to start each vegetable from seed, which has turned the book into a complete growing guide. Local knowledge about seed starting techniques for each vegetable has been shared by expert gardeners from seven regions of the United States-Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast/Gulf Coast, Midwest, Southwest, Central West Coast, and Northwest.
"The genius of Hanson's fascinating, inspiring, and entertaining book stems from the fact that it is not about how all kinds of things grow from seeds; it is about the seeds themselves." --Mark Kurlansky, New York Times Book Review
We live in a world of seeds. From our morning toast to the cotton in our clothes, they are quite literally the stuff and staff of life: supporting diets, economies, and civilizations around the globe. Just as the search for nutmeg and pepper drove the Age of Discovery, coffee beans fueled the Enlightenment and cottonseed sparked the Industrial Revolution. Seeds are fundamental objects of beauty, evolutionary wonders, and simple fascinations. Yet, despite their importance, seeds are often seen as commonplace, their extraordinary natural and human histories overlooked. Thanks to this stunning new book, they can be overlooked no more. This is a book of knowledge, adventure, and wonder, spun by an award-winning writer with both the charm of a fireside story-teller and the hard-won expertise of a field biologist. A fascinating scientific adventure, it is essential reading for anyone who loves to see a plant grow.
