Homegrown Harvest: A Season-by-Season Guide to a Sustainable Kitchen Garden

In this wonderfully structured gardening guide, generously illustrated with luscious photos, the American Horticultural Society shows temperate-climate gardeners how to make their ways through the gardening year. The book is arranged by season, from early spring to late winter, with how-to advice on growing vegetables and fruits, subdivided into tasks for the different vegetable families and fruit trees, bushes, and vines in each subseason, individualized for mild-winter, medium-temperature, and cold-winter regions. Interspersed are instructions on basics such as how to test soil, grow seedlings, combat pests, and harvest, as well as more esoteric activities like drying herbs for winter use, grafting and pruning fruit trees, and growing edible flowers. Common vegetables and fruits are thoroughly covered, but readers are encouraged to try more exotic edibles as well, from kiwis and lingonberries to Claytonia and red orach (both salad greens), with full pages devoted to the myriad varieties of tomatoes, pears, and potatoes and a section by Lee Reich on growing less familiar native fruits like pawpaws, juneberries, elderberries, and beach plums. The book's sumptuous tone, instructive photographs, and detailed directions should give beginning gardeners the enthusiasm and confidence to get started and organizationally challenged old-timers a sigh of relief that they won't have to figure out what to do next. (Jan.)