Food Grown Right, In Your Backyard: A Beginner's Guide to Growing Crops at Home

I have always wanted to plant a veggie garden, but haven't had the space until recently. I'm putting in a raised bed garden this year and was looking for a book that would simplify "garden knowledge" and give me lots of visual ideas. I also wanted a book that was somewhat relevant to the Pacific Northwest and covered Organic gardening. I have nearly zero garden knowledge by the way.I looked through a few garden books before selecting this one. This had the most visuals of books I looked through.After reading it I was impressed by the simplicity and ease of reading. I usually only had time for one chapter each time I opened the book, which took about 10-20 minutes each. I love the color photographs in each chapter. They were really helpful in illustrating the topics. The book covers the basics, planning, selecting and preparing a location, building planting boxes from scratch or raised beds, container (i.e. pots) gardening, planting and managing your crops through all season/problems, and selecting what crops to grow. It's clear these guys write from personal experiences. Although the authors are from the Pacific Northwest I think the book would apply to most any climate and they seem to write the book in a way that doesn't alienate any climate.The entire book was dedicated to the concept of Organic gardening so there was nothing that covered the use of chemicals or other unnatural products.Armed with the ideas and knowledge from the book I felt confident in my ability to get started. I don't always get that feeling with "do-it-yourself" books, but this one did a great job. I quickly and easily selected a sunny location in my yard that would fit one of the recommended raised bed sizes. I made a crude drawing of what I wanted, acquired second-hand a few of the recommended garden tools, hit the hardware store and I am off and running.

I was very impressed by the quality of this book. Brad and Colin clearly have a great deal experience and knowledge about growing food, especially in the northwestern United States, and it looks like they've tried to share it all! The book caters to a wide range of experience; It is a suitable introduction for beginners, but the reference sections probably have information that would be new to most seasoned gardeners.Stylistically, the book keeps things fresh by moving between between different ways of addressing the reader as the material dictates. Sometimes, the book is textbook. Other times, it is a series of anecdotes. Still other times, it is a Socratic dialog. For me, this made the book a lot easier to read and kept my attention through information that could have been easy to overlook.The latter half of the book is more of a reference, making its way through dozens of plants and pests, and giving solutions to many common garden problems.Visually, the book is beautifully laid out and Hilary has done a fantastic job with the photography, which appears on nearly every page.As an amateur gardener, I'm thrilled with this book. My gardening books from the 80's are nice, but it is great to have a modern urban gardening reference from people who clearly know their stuff!

This is a great, very informative well done book on growing your own veggie garden and more. Easy to understand, well organized, great "tips" sections that are very helpful.The photos are not only beautiful but useful. I have been gardening for nearly 40 years when I came across this book. I was stuck by the clear and complete format of this book. It addresses every aspect of gardening from preparing your soil, composting, planting, details about plants, pests and disease and so much more. I found it to be a worthwhile book to add to my garden book collection and I've learned some new and valuable information. In my opinion this book is not just for beginners but for ALL gardeners.I love the idea and "how to" that McCarte and Halm promote in this book that ANYBODY, no matter what size yard, deck or space you have you can still grow your own food!Growing even a few of your own crops is a rewarding and fun experience and this is a great book to help you accomplish that.

I buy and read tons and tons of books but almost never write reviews...too lazy. But I really love this book and I'm so impressed with how useful it is for my new found gardening passion. It's a great, compact, and beautiful reference book. Concise yet contains all the useful information any novice gardener need for each common plant in an edible garden. Particularly useful to me are the plant profiles for each plant that are packed with information in just a couple of pages. For example: suggestions of how much of each type to plant (having never gardened before, I have no idea how much, say, a cucumber plant, will produce each week), suggested schedules of successive planting, expected number of days it takes each kind of seed to germinate at each temperature bracket (an information I haven't seen in other books), etc., etc. Photos are gorgeous. Best gardening book of it's type that I've read. The authors did a great job!

Great book for beginners such as myself. I have been absolutely horrible with plants in the past so this book has taught me a lot and Im excited to try my hand at my first garden.

This exceeded my expectations. Beautiful book with lots of great tips. Helpful for planning. Great info!

Great book to get started with gardening with tons of info even a seasoned gardener may no know.